Master and Servant
by ChibiRisu-chan
Summary: Riff watches over Cain through another adventure, and reflects on the nature of their world... (First published at Sakura-Crisis.net's Fanworks section in Jan '03.)
1. Default Chapter

Master and servant 

part 1 of a multi-part Count Cain fanfic by Risu-chan, Jan. 2003

(Rated PG, considerably more in-character than the other one...)

* * *

"I'm going," he announced. "Leave a light on, will you?"

I could have said a thousand things, if I had been anyone else. I could have said, _It's a trap! Don't you know it's a trap, or don't you care?_ Or I could have said, _I'm not letting you go. You'll only get yourself hurt, or worse. You keep doing these dangerous things--_

But it was not my place to say those things; all I could say was, "Yes, sir."

He heard the thousand other things anyway; he always did. He actually stopped to smile at me, standing in the doorway, and he said, "You worry too much."

"Yes, sir." _If I don't, sir, who will? You certainly don't worry enough..._

He threw his dark rain-cloak about his shoulders, and left. And all I could do was light the lamps and wait, and pace, and worry.

That night, he came home with his face bruised and several sharp gashes in his arm and shoulder; I said nothing as I helped him out of the bloodstained clothes, cleaned and bandaged his wounds, tucked a blanket around him in his sitting-chair, crushed some ice and folded it into a soft compress and held it to his cheek.

His golden eyes laughed at me and my silence. "Well, at least you won't be able to tell me to dress up as a woman again any time soon."

I bit back my first three responses to that through long and studied habit, and my voice didn't waver as I replied, "Certainly I can. A woman can use makeup. --And must you feel compelled to collect scars with each of your cases, sir?"

"Souvenirs, Riff, souvenirs..." It must have hurt him to smile, because those luminous eyes flickered for a moment. I cupped his own hand against the compress, so that I could turn away to compose myself again and pour the tea I'd prepared, while I'd been hoping so desperately that he would come back in a state to drink it.

For the past decade, he had only permitted sugar in his tea if I had personally brought the sugar and prepared the tea for him; there were so many hurtful memories in it that I rarely offered. But on that night, I didn't ask; I simply put a spoonful and a bit of sugar in his tea and stirred it and handed it to him.

Because, if one laid all the history and all the pain aside, the child he had once been had liked his tea best when it was a little sweet... and it was a cold night, and he had been soaked through and wounded, and it was all the comfort I could offer. He would have had to laugh at me if I offered him warmed scones this far past midnight, and it would have hurt him to laugh. Over a decade, I had learned these things well enough to make them a minor art form, a private one, appreciated only by the two of us.

He sipped at it, and sighed a little, and told me, "You worry more than my mother did."

_That's not difficult, sir._ "One of the perks of the job, sir." I knelt to untie his shoelaces for him.

He made a small wry sound, and set down the tea so that he didn't need to use the injured hand to cuff me across the head lightly, barely enough to rumple my hair. "Stop worrying. That's an order." 

Then he picked up the tea again; I had learned to calculate its sweetness more to his taste than he would ever admit.

I knew how to hear his thousand other things, as well. Any other man would have said, _I'm sorry I made you worry._ Or, another thing that he hadn't said, _It's not worth your concern. They're only scars; it's not like I don't have my share of them._ Or, if he had been feeling particularly honest, or particularly vulnerable, he might have said, _Why do you worry? It's not like I'm worth your concern. It's not like I've ever been worth anyone's concern._ Which was why he carried so many scars; his parents had taught him far too young that to them he was nothing but a vile sin and a shame to be kept secluded, and he had never truly learned to see himself in any other way. And so if he was beaten or wounded, it was only to be expected. It hurt, of course; he was not so inhuman as to be unhurt. But, to him, being wounded by those around him was only a natural part of life. Because he had never lived any other way.

I should have said, _Yes, sir,_ or _I'll do my best, sir._ What I said was, "Then stop making me worry, sir."

Even then, even after a decade and more, I still didn't understand how the villains and murderers he hunted could bear his gaze. Those uncanny golden eyes could see straight through to a man's soul, when he chose -- like a falcon, sometimes, merciless and analytical and utterly without human compassion for the small writhing things he saw there.

I kept perfectly still, kneeling at his feet, and waited for him to decide whether or not he was going to wound me for whatever it was he saw. It took a long time.

Finally, tiredly, he reached out and smoothed my hair where he'd rumpled it earlier. In a soft and exhausted voice, he said, "I don't deserve you, you know. But I am a selfish wretch, and intend to keep you regardless."

Whatever he had seen this evening had left more wounds than the physical ones. "I'm glad to hear it, sir," I said, and meant it. "Because I intend to keep you too."

It was a miscalculation on my part, because he laughed then, despite his battered face. "You do, do you? Which of us do you think owns whom?"

"You are my master, of course," I said. "But you are _my_ master. So, in that way, you are mine, Master Cain."

He smiled a little, crookedly, and closed his eyes. "Then perhaps I should occasionally try to give you a few less reasons to worry."

"I would be grateful, sir." I laid his mud-stained shoes aside to clean later, and went to bring dry night-clothes for him, and decided that he really couldn't scold me for scones in the morning. Besides, Miss Merry would be delighted.

But each time he flinched as I helped him coax the injured arm into his nightshirt and prepare for bed, I silently cursed everything that came to mind. Him, for being such a rash and stubborn and impulsive hazard-seeker. Myself, that I couldn't protect him from himself no matter how much I tried. His father, both for the scars on his back and for the scars in his soul that I could never even touch to try to mend. Whichever petty fool of a villain had seen fit to assault him this evening. Him again, for allowing it, for valuing himself so little, and for being so completely unwilling or unable to learn anything from the devotion I had offered him for so many years. His father again, for hurting him so deeply that I could never make him believe I gave him such devotion because he was worthy of it. Both of his mothers, for being so wrapped up in themselves that they thought nothing of what was being done to their defenseless child. --And the universe, for allowing things like this to happen. That seemed a good comprehensive curse to end with, as I carefully tucked the blankets over him.

"Good night, sir."

"I know why you're still single," he said drowsily, with a mocking golden glitter beneath his half-lowered lashes. "You can't find a woman who makes a better wife than you do."

"And why then are you still single, sir?"

"Because I already have you, of course!"

I considered several comebacks while I bent to blow out the lamp at his bedside, and finally settled on my most urbane, "Thank you, sir."

He giggled like a much younger boy, and stuck out his tongue at me, and made a small shooing gesture; I picked up his shoes, and was careful to close the door quietly behind myself.

*              *              *

I let him sleep later than he would otherwise have wished, because I knew he would rest badly with his wounds. But Miss Merryweather was awake and underfoot bright and early the next morning; at times it would not be difficult for someone to convince me that the child had an internal clock set to 'trouble.'

"Brother came back late last night," she said, "didn't he. Was he out with a lady?" She sounded entirely too suspicious.

"I wouldn't know," I replied, "since I was here."

"But you always stay up until he comes in. Didn't you ask him?"

"No," I said, which was true enough. "If Master Cain wishes me to know something, he tells me."

"Aren't you going to tell me _anything?_"

"If Master Cain wishes you to know something, he tells you as well."

"You're no fun at all!"

"Not even when I bake scones for breakfast?"

"Scones...?" But then, unwilling to relent so easily, she said, "Just a little fun. Maybe. Sometimes. -Hmph." She turned on her heel and flounced out of the kitchen.

Master Cain and I had come to a quiet understanding some time earlier. Miss Merry was never to be worried by her brother's escapades, whether or not I was. At first, tying his shoes for him had been nothing more than an indulgence; later, it permitted us a way to keep Miss Merry from realizing when he came home hurt, or at least to keep her from realizing how badly hurt, if it was too obvious to hide. If it had been unusual for me to enter his room and help him dress, she would have been far more suspicious far more quickly; but by then it was a long-established pattern.

I often wished that his silently concealing injuries had not become quite so much a part of the pattern. He had been in the habit of hiding his scars from anyone but me for too many years, though; it had never been difficult to hide new scars with the old ones. 

Once his vest and jacket were in place, he tucked the hand of the wounded arm into the outer pocket, to appear casual, and to ease the weight on his shoulder, and to give Miss Merry a reason to target the other hand. Master Cain never did anything for only one reason.

He glanced in the mirror, more to judge whether the hand in the pocket was an acceptably idle-looking subterfuge than anything to do with his dress or hair; and then he gave me a still-slightly-crooked grin, pointing at the bruised cheek.

"What did we use last time? An argument with a doorknob in the dark, or an argument with some lady's outraged kinsman?"

"We used the doorknob last," I said, "but Miss Merry was quite curious this morning to know whether you had been out with a lady."

"The kinsman then?"

"It may be difficult if you cannot actually produce the lady, sir. Something a bit closer to the truth perhaps? Out walking late, and you tripped over a badly-placed cobblestone..."

"I'm not that clumsy!"

"Would you prefer to display a compromised lady and outraged kinsman for inspection, sir?"

He waved his free hand irritably. "Fine, fine. I'll swallow my pride for once." Then he looked up at me with one of his more sly grins: "But as for the lady..."

"Of course there is a lady, sir," I said tiredly. "There always seems to be a lady involved in these cases of yours. The question is whether or not you wish Miss Merry to insist upon an introduction to this particular one."

"Not to Merry, no. Actually I thought I might introduce the two of you." He chuckled at my expression, which I suspect must have been somewhat less stoic than usual, and opened the door with a flourish. "Well, then, off to face the lions!"

As I held his chair at the table, Master Cain gave me a good solid glare for the scones, but since Miss Merry was already happily devouring one with every evidence of sheer delight  -- and jam-sticky fingers -- there was really nothing he could do but eat them beside her. This morning I was careful to ask both of them whether they wanted sugar in their tea; Miss Merry did, of course, and Master Cain refused, with what in anyone else I would have called pique. 

When Miss Merry scampered off to play in the garden, the tirade I was about to receive was mercifully interrupted by the arrival of the housekeeper, who chased us both out into the lawn so that the cleaning of the house could commence.

"It seems to be a good day for a leisurely ride, sir," I offered.

The hotly yellow-eyed glare he turned on me might have caught something on fire, if he hadn't immediately followed it by clutching at my sleeve so that he could laugh himself light-headed.

*              *              *

Perhaps, on reflection, I should not have played into his hands so directly; I hadn't forgotten his half-threat of an introduction to the lady of his latest case, but I hadn't expected him to take that direct an interest in pursuing his plans. I also hadn't expected that my master of all people would become entangled with one who was so clearly not a lady. When the horses were saddled and we were leaving the manor gates, though, I should have been more aware of his intentions the moment he turned his mount rather than allowing it to take its own direction. Perhaps it would have changed nothing; but then again, perhaps it could have.

He led us to where a Gypsy caravan had camped in a clearing in the nearby woods. At first I thought I saw a boy sitting on the steps to the caravan, but the sound of our horses carried further than sight through the underbrush, and I was behind; when we came to a halt in the clearing, the step was empty.

"Althea?" Master Cain called, and swung down from his horse. "I have brought someone whom you should meet."

There was no reply from inside, until he put his boot on the bottom step leading up to the wagon. Then a voice from within said wearily, "Go away. Go and take your accursed demon's eyes with you. I want nothing to do with your curse, or your sight, or your pity. Go."

"My curse is nothing to do with you," he replied, far too levelly for my peace of mind; it was perhaps a good thing for her sake that this Althea had not known him long enough to recognize that voice. "My sight is my own, and as my eyes have already been claimed by a collector of such things, I dare say he would fight you for the privilege of removing them. And you will have no pity from me if you do not wish it; but there is one here whom I may pity whether or not it pleases you."

He tied his horse's reins to the wagon, and shrugged off his riding-cloak to leave it over the saddle, and walked up the steps quietly.

"I said go away."

"But I," he replied, dangerously cheerful, "being the demon-eyed rogue that I am, have no intention of obeying you! I would ask your pardon; but, as it is clear that you will not grant it--" 

And he swept aside the curtain at the back of the wagon to let himself in, neatly dodging a flung pot in the process. "Riff, come on."

He still startled me far more often than I would ever admit. I could feel my face burning. "Master Cain--"

"_Now,_ Riff."

The woman inside was cursing his name pungently in a variety of words I had never heard, but could well guess at, considering that I was thinking many of the same things, though less colorfully. "Yes, Master Cain," I said, and bent my head to follow him.

It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the more shadowy interior of the wagon, and the assortment of wildly varied shapes within -- a slim dark shadow edged in white was Master Cain, of course, but for a moment I could not distinguish which of several other brightly-patterned objects were furniture and which was the person whom he had addressed. 

"And just what is this giant white-haired ox you have brought, you ill-mannered witch-eyed blackguard?"

The caravan was considerably too small for me, though Master Cain could stand upright inside it; I hit my head on the ceiling trying to turn toward her voice. 

Master Cain said, in a voice that was clearly amused despite himself, "This giant white-haired ox is a dear and loyal friend, and I trust him with more than my life. But more to the point, Riff has had medical training. --I do assume that you would prefer to be attended by someone more educated than your seven-year-old brother?"

"Go away."

I could see, now, what Master Cain had seen, and why he had brought me here. The woman, Althea, was lying abed in the darkest corner of the wagon, with a wild-colored shawl dragged over her dress to distract the eyes; but when I looked at the shape that she made, not at the patterns she hid behind, it was clear enough.

"Whether or not you wish it, Althea, you cannot escape now," he said. "Your condition is too advanced; and all the wailing and recriminations in the world will do nothing to prevent the child's birth, when the time comes. I do not ask you to be pleased with this; I do not even ask you to consider that the child itself never asked to exist. All that I ask is that you allow me to care for it, once it has come."

"Get out!" she said. "Get out, or I will curse you to the third hell--"

Master Cain laughed aloud. "Curse _me?_ Woman, don't waste your breath! I am in and of hell itself. Did you not see it in me the moment we met?" 

He bent closer to her, still wearing that wild, brilliantly dangerous smile. "Look into these damned yellow eyes and tell me if there is any curse you can give me that I have not been given," he said. "My mother wished me dead before my birth, and cursed me with her life and her death; my father, who tried to kill me, cursed me that I would live in pain and die alone; what is there that you can possibly add to that? --Do go on, my dear lady, I'm intrigued now."

After a long shaking moment, she said again, "Get out. Please..."

I would have sat down to catch my breath, if I hadn't been afraid of breaking something unrecognizable under a pile of fabric. "Master Cain," I said, "forgive me, but if she asks... If a lady who... if... --Master Cain, is she... yours...?"

He turned to stare at me in consternation heavily laced with hilarity. "You mean, is the child mine? Good God, no! Her brother brought me here last week, because he thought I could poison the baby so that she would not need to bear it." 

But for all the affected levity, his voice shook badly at that. It startled me. I think it even startled her. 

"You say it yourself," Althea said, trembling. "It is not yours; I am not yours; this is none of your concern. Go. Leave me alone."

"It is my concern," he said, sharply. "If I do nothing, there will be a child born here whose name is cursed just as mine was. Give me the child. I am nobly born, even if not nobly mannered; I can afford to feed and clothe and educate it, and my sister would love to have another child in the manor house. --I seem to be collecting a menagerie of the cursed and reviled, beginning with myself; it would not be the burden to me that it is to you. Or if you cannot trust me so far, at least promise me that you will see that it is well cared for. Please."

"Why do you care?"

"Because you carry my brother, or my sister," he said. "Not of blood, but of pain. A child just as unwanted as I am... I feel the kinship in that, even though no law would agree. At least let me raise it in a place where we are accustomed to living this way... it is a cursed house, yes, but it is all I have. Please. I will beg if you ask it." His voice shook on the verge of breaking. "I am... not skilled in kindness, or in love; my family was not one which could teach such things. But I have tried; I can try..."

"All I wanted from you was poison," she said unhappily. "If you will not give it to me, go away."

"I told you," he said, ragged-voiced. "You cannot poison the child without poisoning yourself."

"Then poison me!" she said. "Just let me be done with this. All of this."

Master Cain made a sharp, frustrated movement; I reached over to catch his shoulder before he put a fist through a wall or window.

"Miss Althea," I said, still holding him carefully, "there is a small cottage-house on the Hargreaves lands, just past the edge of the forest. The village children often play there, as though it were their own; we would need to convince them that they could no longer burst in unannounced, of course, but it would be a good thing for the village to have someone in that house, someone who knows what it is to care for children. Master Cain mentioned that you have a young brother; would you truly wish to die and leave him?"

She looked up at me with something unspeakably old and hollow glittering in her dark eyes. "I'm... I'm just... so tired... I just want to be done..."

"I understand," I said, carefully. "I would guess that your time is very near now, isn't it? It must have been difficult, being alone, needing to care for yourself and for your brother, and being frightened of what is happening to you. Will you come out into the sunshine for a bit, and allow me to answer your questions, so that perhaps you need not be as frightened...?"

"You're a man," she said. "What would you know of it?"

"I am also a man," Master Cain said darkly, "and yet you had no reservations in asking me for death; that is all that a master of poisons such as myself can give to you. But Riff is far gentler than I, and has made a study not of death but of life. I should think that you would find him a much more agreeable conversationalist, when it comes to matters of living, and ways to begin it rather than to end it."

After a moment, she said, "You aren't going to leave unless I do as you demand, are you."

"Riff would, if I were not here," Master Cain said, toying idly with the handle of his cane. "He is a gentleman, whereas I am merely noble."

"Master Cain--"

"But since I _am_ here, and since you've already witnessed the efficacy of cursing my name and my lineage and anything else that comes to mind," he informed her blithely, "you may as well surrender now."

So I unearthed a chair from a tangle of rugs and blankets and carried it outside, and Master Cain helped her down the stairs since he could move about in the wagon without setting off an avalanche of some sort, and between us we saw her settled in the chair as comfortably as could be managed for one so late in her condition.

"It hurts," she said, fretful, and holding on to the arms of the chair tightly.

"Where?" Master Cain asked, utterly heedless of propriety. 

I am certain that in the sunlight my blushing was quite a bit more visible; it is one of the more regrettable results of having such a pale complexion. Althea looked at me with an expression that somehow both offered sympathy and asked for a return of it.

"You silly woman, how are we to be of assistance if you will not tell us what it is that hurts you?" Master Cain said with a sigh, chin propped in one hand.

"I thought you said you were only a poisoner!" she flared back, and reached for my hand so that she would have an excuse not to reach for his. She curved my hand against the top of her swollen abdomen, and looked away. It only took a moment for me to realize what she felt.

"That's natural, Miss Althea," I said. "The baby is kicking; that's all."

"Natural or not, it hurts," she said.

"It should settle when it becomes accustomed to your new position." 

I pressed carefully, to see if I could encourage the child to shift its position, and then moved my hand a bit lower to press again. After a few moments' cautious exploration, although I had not finished my medical training and although this was hardly the most professional of examinations, I felt relatively confident that the child was resting properly for such advanced pregnancy, with its head lowered toward her hips. 

I had thought it quite likely that her poor unwanted babe would be safely born, then.

Althea said, "Ox, make him stop staring at me. His eyes are like corpse-candles."

Master Cain was, in truth, staring at her -- absorbed in some fierce and private contemplation. Not entirely certain what to do myself, I cleared my throat a little; he looked over at me then.

"Can you really feel that?" he demanded.

"Er... feel what, sir?"

"Can you really feel the baby moving...? Inside...?"

"I... er... oh, dear." I looked at Althea, whose expression was far from promising. "Miss Althea, if you wouldn't mind too much, might I possibly presume so far as to...?"

"So: someone condescends to _ask_ things now, rather than commanding? How novel." She reached over and caught at Master Cain's arm herself -- the wrong arm. 

He gasped sharply, and jerked away. Althea stared at him, then at me; her face wore the horrified reflection of the whispered rumors and superstitions about a man with a cat's yellow eyes, who made death his favorite hobby.

"Master Cain was injured last night," I said, struggling to fight off the impulse to take his coat off him to see whether she had reopened the wounds. "Sir...?"

He shook his head, still a little short of breath from the sharp jolt of pain, and held out his unwounded hand imperiously. But Althea showed no great eagerness to touch him again; with a sigh, I set my fingertips against her belly to feel for any movements within, then brought his hand to rest against one particular place. 

"Breathe," Althea said. For a moment, it bewildered me, until I realized she meant Master Cain, who had apparently stopped doing so.

He did, with a small gasp; then he bent closer to the loose fabric of her gown and stroked a bit, very gently. "Hello, there, little brother," he murmured. "Or little sister. It is -- it is a terrifyingly sweet pleasure to meet you this way..." Then he looked up at me swiftly, sharply. "Every mother can feel this--?"

I nodded a little, because the raw pain in his eyes had just taken all my words from me.

"Every mother can feel this," he repeated, staring down at my hand and his own, resting together upon Althea's heavily distended abdomen. "Every mother can... --And still she hated me...?"

"Your mother never wanted you either?" Althea said, tilting her head back to stare up at the sky. "You're a man. You don't understand at all."

"What is it that a man would not understand?"

"A man doesn't get himself mocked, and reviled, and chased out of a city with flung rocks, and a man doesn't have to suffer with it," she said, sharp-voiced. "For months and months, it hurts; everything hurts; and at the end, it hurts a lot more. And you can't help thinking, 'If only this damned thing were never here.If only the damned creature had never quickened in me, I wouldn't have to suffer this. For the rest of my life I'll be despised and treated like filth, because of this damned thing growing in my belly.'"

"But is it the child's fault?" he asked.

"Of course it is!" she said. "The father does what he does and walks away whistling, and there's not a thing a woman can do to prove what happened, and no one cares anyway; but if there isn't a child it doesn't matter. It's only when there's a child that the woman has to suffer for it. It's certainly not my fault I was taken and--" She stopped short, and looked away, and said angrily, "Of course it's the child's fault."

"I see," Master Cain said, far too quietly.

For one brief moment, I hated Althea with all my soul; because she was there, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't take him in my arms and hold him, or take him by the shoulders and shake him and tell him, _She's been badly hurt and she's bitter and she's wrong. Your parents were sick and mad, and it's not your fault that they were!_ I couldn't think of a single thing that I could do or say in front of her.

Still in that terrifyingly quiet voice, Master Cain said, "But if you give me the child, then it will be almost like it never happened, for you. You would never need to think of it again; you could go away and forget that it had ever lived." 

He looked up at her with something unreadable hidden beneath the golden shimmer of his eyes, and added, in far too dark and fey a temptation, "Wouldn't that please you? Wouldn't you like that very much...? "

She looked up at him, eyes narrowed. "What, are you mad? Of course I would, you -- you... You're actually serious, aren't you...?"

"Perfectly."

"You'd actually take the wretched thing and let me go? Just like that? Nothing held over me, no favors demanded for keeping your silence?"

He sat back on his heels then. "I am Count Cain Hargreaves, and you are a vagrant," he said, rather coldly. "What could I possibly wish to demand from you?"

Her lip curled. "The usual."

So did his. "I prefer not to share my bed with vermin from lice on up."

She glared at him, but it was obvious that there was no reply that wouldn't sound like an invitation. Instead, arch-voiced, she said, "How do you know I won't come back and claim you as the child's father?"

"What difference would it make if you did?" he countered. "The child will be cared for, and former mistresses who lack the courtesy to take their dismissals gracefully can find that there are far less graceful dismissals to be had. Particularly if they were never mistresses in the first place. --And, as you said, a father's guilt cannot be proven anywhere near as readily as a mother's."

"Would you poison me if I tried to make trouble for you?" 

Soft as silk, he replied, "Do you intend to make trouble for me, in order to find out?"

The battle of wills held for a long silent moment, fierce black eyes staring into molten gold. 

Althea looked away first. Perhaps someone should have warned her earlier about the dangers of arguing with my master. I was not feeling charitable enough to lay the unclaimed responsibility upon myself.

"I go where I wish, when I wish, once the child is born," she said, glaring off to one side.

"When you intend to leave," he said, "you give me two weeks' notice, so that I can find a nurse for the child."

"If I give you two days' notice, young master witch-eyes, you can call yourself lucky."

"One week. After all, you will be fed and housed; it is not so vile a servitude I would place you in."

After a moment's consideration, she spat in her palm and held it out to him, and said, "Deal."

If Master Cain was anywhere near as taken aback as I was, he certainly did a much better job of concealing it; he mirrored the gesture precisely, with only a hazed glimmer of distaste in his eyes, and she shook his hand.

Althea shifted uncomfortably in her chair, a hand pressed to her side, and said, "Why does it feel as though I have made myself a bargain with the Devil?"

"If you were to come to care for your child," he said, "if it were to become precious to you, I would release you from this the moment you asked."

She laughed, shortly and sharply. "Oh, you can have it. ...But you're quite certain you're not going to change your mind and 'charge' me extra for my keep?"

"You can rest assured," Master Cain said, with half-lidded eyes. "And quite virtuously alone, as you please."

There were, of course, details to be arranged; the people of the manor would be startled by and suspicious of a wandering Gypsy woman who simply took up residence in the  abandoned cottage where the children played. 

Master Cain left it to me; he wandered off toward the edge of the woods, his attention caught by some flower that I dared not ask about. I had made that mistake before; too often, his blithe and smiling reply had been not _Look, how beautiful,_ but _Look, how deadly._ Or, even more disturbing, both at once. 

As much as I admired him, and as much as I would never serve any other man the way I served him, there were still parts of my master's soul that I did not understand; and silently I prayed that I never would understand such things.

Althea was a nasty and suspicious haggler. But I was completely certain that, unlike Master Cain's mother, she was not out of her wits; she wanted to be cared for and tended through the end of the pregnancy and the birth, particularly if it was at a nobleman's whim and expense rather than her own. We came to both an arrangement and a type of mutual understanding.

Watching him kneel on the far side of the clearing with his uninjured hand carefully picking through the undergrowth for some small and white and unremarkable-looking flowers, she asked me, "Ox, is your witch of a master actually mad? Did the poisons muddle his mind that much? Or does he only try to make people believe he is mad?"

"_Ox,_ indeed; a fine thing for a disgraced woman to call her only semblance of a doctor. My name is Riff," I said.

"So? --Mad like a hatter or mad like a fox?"

"You've spoken with him for more than five minutes now," I said, tired. "Therefore, you should know for yourself that that is hardly an easy question to answer."

"If he makes a habit of taking every unwanted child in the country," she said, "you'll have quite a brood on your hands."

"I am fond of children," I said. "And he..." _He would not be so close to alone, then, or so afraid of becoming alone._ "He is rather a paragon."

"A what?"

"Exemplary." 

She was still staring at me. 

"...Never mind." Even if the woman understood the words, she would never understand the meaning; not when she could not forgive her child its father's sins, nor understand why it was that he could care for a child not even born, and not even his own, because it was unloved by those who should have loved it.

And he said that he was unskilled in kindness. It was perhaps one of the world's most bitter ironies that his golden eyes could see straight through any rogue in the country; and yet because he hated his own eyes so, he could never bring them to bear upon any mirror in which he might see that which rested within his own soul...

The flowers were not in evidence when he returned; they had been either discarded or carefully tucked away for later use. Consequently, I was uncertain whether their absence should have relieved or concerned me. But his silence certainly concerned me, as we rode back. I could think of a thousand things that needed to be said to him, and not a single way to say any of them.

"Riff," he said, "your mother..." And then he stopped.

"Yes, Master Cain...?"

"Never mind."

What could I have said? That I knew not all mothers were like Althea and his own, because my mother had loved me? It would hardly have helped him to hear yet again that he had been hated in a way few children were. 

And so I said nothing, and listened to his silence, and every step of the path hurt.

*              *              *

Miss Merryweather was a charming, headstrong, wilful, and somewhat spoiled little girl, but she was far from insensitive. Her first impulse was to pester us mercilessly about where we had been and whether her elder brother had been seen in the presence of some lady. But within two minutes of watching Master Cain flinch at her heedless insistence on hearing details of the afternoon, and watching myself trying to deflect her from his reactions, she realized that she was hurting him somehow, even if she didn't understand how or why. 

She stood in front of us with her hands on her hips and her head tipped to one side, like a puzzled little bird; then she ran up and flung her arms around her brother's waist, and startled him.

"Tell me later, all right?" she asked. "And, Riff, make some tea for big brother; he likes your tea best of all." She hugged him carefully, and said, "If you feel like playing later, I'll be in the garden. I can tell your fortune if you like, or Riff's. I'll be sure to make it a good fortune!" 

She caught his free hand and pressed her cheek against the back of it for a moment, wistfully; while he was still staring down at her in astonishment, she let go, and skittered away like a bit of dandelion fluff blown by an intangible breeze.

"If I may, sir," I said, daring more than I should have. "Never doubt that you are loved. Never doubt that you are dearly loved."

"But the pair of you are at least as mad as I," he said, with a strange strained smile. "More so, in that you think fondly of a half-mad poisoner, which hardly seems a sane trait to cultivate. Is all love a type of madness, then, as is all hate? It seems to me that the two cannot be so very far divided... although I do acknowledge that I have not had the most ideal models upon which to base my judgements of familial behavior. --Or even sane behavior, come to that. I think that perhaps I have no business even pretending to raise a child."

"Of course her child will be happier here, with you and with Miss Merry," I said. "Any child would be happier in a house where it was loved, rather than hated."

"...And there I must take your word; because I wouldn't know, would I."

With a knot in my throat, I said, "No, sir, I suppose not."

I made tea, and offered cream, and he waved it away vaguely; he spent far more time staring into the cup than drinking from it. But as much as I wanted to sit down beside him and take him by the shoulders and shake him until he either shouted at me or burst into tears or reacted in any way other than sitting there gnawing a hole in his own soul -- however much I wanted that, I was his servant, not his family, and I had duties in his service which I could not simply ignore. 

In the afternoon, I convinced Miss Merry's tutor that she should spend some time with her music lessons, and left the doors to Master Cain's study open so that he could hear her play. 

Sometimes he would wander down to the conservatory and stand by her shoulder, and once in a great while she could tease him into singing with her. Not often; his voice was untrained, a light, tentative, rather boyish tenor; and he was embarrassed to reveal even that much, even around his family. But when she was particularly charming, and when he felt particularly glad to have her, and a little less frightened by the thought of losing his still-fragile new family, then he would sing with her, in order to see her smile. 

I knew when I left the doors open that this was unlikely to be one of those days; but I  hoped that the sound alone might remind him.

Dinner was an awkward business; Miss Merry was going out of her way to win some sort of reaction from her brother, and Master Cain was going out of his way to keep his silence, and not to let his darker thoughts intrude upon the rest of us. So she behaved badly, and he barely even noticed. It ended up with the housekeeper scolding the girl for making a mess, Miss Merry bursting into tears and running out and slamming the door behind herself, and Master Cain looking up at the sound of the door slamming, in some perplexity. 

I could have laughed, or cried; rather than either of those, I said, "Shall I bring something to your study instead, sir?"

He nodded a little, and stood, and walked out; I looked around at the empty room and the disordered table, and in the echoing silence I could barely hear myself think. So I tried not to think, as I put together a tray with a plate and a pot of tea to carry up to him.

Master Cain was standing at the window when I tapped on the open door and walked in; since he didn't respond to my presence, I set the tray down and picked up a spoon, and said, "Milk or sugar, sir...?"

He spun around and knocked the spoon out of my hand with one sharp blow.

Stunned, I took a half-step back, staring down at him. "Master Cain...?"

"Why?" he asked. "Why do you do these things? Why are you still doing these things?"

Hurt more than I wanted to admit, I said, "I assure you there is nothing wrong with the tea, sir."

"Not that way," he said, and dug a hand through his hair. "Merry -- she's a child. She has no one else in this world, nowhere else she can go. She stays with me because I am her only kinsman and her only protector. Of course she would not leave this place; she could not. But you... you could leave."

"But I have promised you, sir, that I will not."

"Why not?" he demanded. "You were to be a doctor! You have the mind for it, and the talent; why are you still here serving me?"

Badly shaken, I said, "I... I thought... that you wanted me here, sir, and so..."

"Oh, I do," he said, grimly. "Selfish, shallow-minded bastard that I am -- of course I want you here. But do you know why you are still here? Because you, who could have been a doctor -- I have made you into my whore."

I was so shocked I couldn't help laughing. "Master Cain, I would think I would have noticed--!"

"Have I not?" he asked, uncompromising. "I pay you for your every kindness. You offer me services which bring me pleasure, and they are bought and paid for... but not as they should have been; I pay you just enough to keep you in pretty clothes, and dependent upon me..."

"Master Cain, I serve you because I care about you," I said. "And I have no wish for a raise, and I have no wish to be fired either. I am very happy to serve you, and I very much hope that you are pleased with my service."

"But if I were a good man," he said, "rather than just a greedy and lonely child, it would have occurred to me a decade ago what I should have done with you. I should have paid your way through that medical school the day I became Count Hargreaves, and I should have set you free. But I did not, because I wanted to keep you for myself."

"Master Cain--"

"Why did you never ask me?" he whispered. "Why did you never ask me to return the life my father took from you? Even if I was too selfish to see it for myself -- if you had asked me, I would surely have realized then what I had made of you...! Why did it take me so long to realize that I should not keep _anyone_ here, whether or not a child, because all that binds anyone to me is the lack of a way to leave--"

He was becoming hysterical; I took him by the shoulders carefully, and held him still. 

"Master Cain," I said, "if I asked, would you still give me the money to go to medical school?"

He stared up at me, with a shimmer of unshed tears gathering in his brilliant eyes. "Yes," he said. "Damn it, yes. I... should have expected-- I'll go and--"

"No, you won't," I said, holding on to his shoulders tightly. "You're not going anywhere, because even if you tried, I would not and will not accept it. Keep your money. And keep me. Because I don't want medical school. What I want most in the world is to stay here at your side."

The tears spilled down his cheeks; with a strained half-laugh, he said, "Even though I have made you my whore?"

"You offered me my freedom," I said. "I gave it back. I don't want it."

"But... Riff, you could..."

"Master Cain, I have tried for many years to live in such a way as to show you my devotion through my service," I said. "I had fancied that my efforts were not unappreciated. I would be most bitterly disappointed to be wrong in that." 

"Riff-- I--" He gulped hard, and said, "You're not wrong. It's just that-- you should have been more than--"

I brushed a careful fingertip over his cheek to try to dry his tears, and my own voice was none too steady as I pushed the point home. "If I am not wrong, and you have understood and appreciated why I offer you my company and my service, then I am precisely where I should be. And so if you _ever_ again try to say to me that 'the only thing binding me here is a lack of a way to leave,' I may blacken your eye for you, sir."

I let him go then; there were still tear-streaks on his face, and I needed a moment to compose myself as well. Looking around for a distraction, I picked up the fallen spoon and put it in my pocket for later washing, then spotted another in with his pens on his desk and reached for it.

"As I asked some time ago, sir, mil--"

Again, he knocked the spoon out of my hands, although this time not angrily -- rather more frantically.

"Not that one; I used it to measure cyanide!"

Struggling to keep a straight face, I replied, "The tea should be black this evening, then?"

"Yes, please," he agreed, weakly, and streaked the back of his arm across his face, and bit his lip; but the giggle escaped anyway. "A fitting mishap that would be, you so careful with the sugar and me poisoning my own spoon...! How my father would laugh..."

"I would far prefer never to give him such pleasure, sir."

All in all, it was quite an evening of soothing tempests. After I left Master Cain looking at his dinner with the first sign of interest he had displayed for a while, I sought out the housekeeper and spent some time placating her about the occasional frustrated behavior of a little lonely orphaned girl whose only brother's moods could be difficult for a child to understand -- if one were to put it mildly. The housekeeper rather sourly granted me the validity of that point, and charged me with seeing to it that the child improved her behavior; I promised to give it my best, of course.

After that, I found Miss Merry tearfully sticking sharp hatpins into a doll with a stolen handkerchief-apron and a scribbled-over face, and could guess what sorts of curses she was heaping on the poor housekeeper's head. While I doubted her viciously applied hatpins would in any way impair the real housekeeper, the sentiment behind it was hardly to be encouraged. That storm-in-a-teacup took me much more coaxing to settle, and a few reminders of how nicely the housekeeper cooked, and a few not-so-subtle musings on how I would feel to be despised by Miss Merry for doing my duty in her brother's service; and how likely the housekeeper would be hurt by her anger, just as I would be; and how, if Miss Merry were not to produce wanton wilful messes in order to express her frustration, the housekeeper would be better able to serve both the master of the house and Miss Merry herself. 

I suggested that next time she wished to distract Master Cain from his silences, she might go and pick wildflowers for him, and ask him to teach her about them. Silently I dreaded the sorts of conversations two such morbid-minded siblings might produce over a handful of unidentified herbs, but at least it would save on recriminations with the staff, and the idea seemed to comfort her a little. All she had wanted was a little attention and conversation from her brother, and with a bit of steering she seemed willing to try new methods, since the first attempts had been self-evidently fruitless.

Finally Miss Merry scrubbed the tears off her face and began to pull the pins out of the abused doll and replace them in her jewelry-chest. I helped her wash its face, and her own, and praised her change of heart lavishly as I tucked her into bed cuddling a much cleaner aproned-housekeeper doll.

Then it was time to make the rounds of the house, checking to be sure that all the windows were properly latched and shuttered and that the lamps had been extinguished in all the empty rooms, and to review with the housekeeper and the other servants what was to be done the next day. The maids were still sulky about having cleaned up after Miss Merry's tantrum; I tried to soothe injured pride as best I could, and to both express sympathy for their position and ask sympathy for Miss Merry's. The girls were busily nursing their sense of being greatly put upon, though; it seemed wiser to try again when the memories weren't quite so fresh.

Although my feet were dragging a bit as I went back up the stairs to Master Cain's study, I thought it was a pardonable lapse in decorum, considering what a trial the day had been. Apparently I was not the only one worn out by the day; Master Cain had fallen asleep in the bay window, with several books and a notebook in his lap and propped open beside him.

It took a moment's hesitation for me to decide what to do. On the one hand, I had both no business seeing Master Cain's notes and no wish to find out whether those plain little flowers had been toxic after all. On the other hand, I knew he always rested badly when he was injured, and once he had fallen asleep, it would be kindest not to move or disturb him.

So I put the tea and plates back on the serving tray and straightened the rest of his desk quietly, to clear some space so that I could shift the books from his lap to the desk; then, very carefully, I took the books one at a time, from beside him, and then from under his hands. Once the books and the pencil had been safely removed, I brought a blanket to tuck around him, and then saw to unlacing his shoes.

His hand came to rest very gently upon my hair; still, since I hadn't been expecting it, it startled me.

"Sir...?"

He couldn't have been more than half awake, if that. "Thank you," he murmured, "for everything."

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you, sir," I said, "but you might find your bed more comfortable than the window."

Definitely not half awake, even; he blinked a little, and I could see that it had been too complicated a sentence when he might have caught one word of six. Instead, he stroked my hair a little, as though I were Miss Merry's age. "You promised me..."

There was only one promise that mattered to him, of course; only one that tied so deeply into the nightmares that still woke him screaming some nights.

"I promised, sir," I said, as I had a dozen times before, hoping that one of these years he would come to believe it even in that terrified corner of his soul where the only sound he could hear was his father's voice cursing him to a life of lonely pain. "I'll never leave you."

That was what he had needed to hear; he let himself relax then, his eyes drifting closed. "Thank you," he murmured, letting his hand rest on the crown of my head as though it were too heavy for him to support. "Don't leave me. Don't ever leave..."

I sat perfectly still for a long, long minute.

Of course I understood that he hadn't meant it so literally; of course I knew he was far enough asleep that I could have shifted his hand and gone to my own bed. But it seemed to me that of all days, this was certainly one in which someone should remind him that he was not alone. He wanted to bring Althea's child into the manor for his own sake as much as Merry's; he wanted one unwanted child in the world to come into the sort of home he had never had, with people who saw a child as a child, not as a shameful breathing reminder of their own sins and passions and guilts. He wanted to give an unwanted infant the sort of comfort that he had never been given, until his father gave me to him as though I were a replacement for his dead bird.

Perhaps to Alexis I had been; Alexis had never seen anyone but himself as human. Alexis had never seen anyone but himself in his world. His sister was an object to be possessed; his child was an object to be despised and beaten; likely, to him, his child's pets and his child's servants were equally disposable and replaceable and subhuman. And so he had given me to his son, because another bird had not been at hand.

And so Master Cain had been appalled at a reflection of his father that he had never seen in himself. Although I had been his servant for years and his friend just as long, I had also been the first treasure he had ever been given which was not taken away or destroyed beyond mending. For a moment, he had been horrified at the thought that he might have been treating me as his father had treated him -- as an object with no thoughts or desires of its own, even if a treasured object.

At one time, many years ago, I would have been overjoyed if Master Cain had offered to pay my way through that medical school. I would have thanked him profusely and left with a light step, and perhaps I might occasionally have come back to visit, to reiterate my thanks and to repay my debt as I could. But, since I was not an object, I _did_ have thoughts and desires of my own -- and over the years, since I was living and changing, those thoughts and desires had changed accordingly.

I would have been completely devastated if Master Cain had insisted on sending me away to medical school now, through guilt at what he had not seen in the past. And I knew it had been a much closer call than I wished to consider. 

When he was convinced that what he was doing was right, it would take a more formidable opponent than death itself to dissuade him. He had made himself the master of a thousand different forms of death, and death did not frighten him; life did. And I was certainly nowhere near formidable enough to oppose him, and I knew it. By all rights, I should have been a doctor, and that evening I could have been sent away through that same unshakable "should have been," and the thought still terrified me to the core of my bones.

Even half asleep this evening, he had reached to touch me to reassure himself that I was real, and that my presence was not simply a pleasant dream from which he would wake to his father's cursed lonely agony. So I chose not to take that from him even in his sleep. But also, I chose not to take from myself the gift that he had reached for me, that he had wanted me at his side. 

I sat down more comfortably next to him in the bay window, and tucked the ends of the blanket around myself as well. I was careful not to disturb his hand as I quietly settled my head into his lap and closed my eyes.

*              *              *

Part 2 (coming soon I hope... ^^;;)


	2. chapter 2

Master and Servant, part 2 

by Risu-chan

For one brief, completely sleep-hazed moment, I was eight years old again, sitting at home with my family, and my mother was stroking my hair. It was quite disorienting to have each of the pieces fall back into place: no, there had been a decade and more since then, and I was to be a doctor -- no, the fire; my family -- Master Cain...

Master Cain was stroking my hair, softly, quietly, with a touch almost as light as the sun shining through the window. 

"Good morning," he said. "Much as it astonishes me, you were quite soundly asleep..."

"...Good morning, sir. I'm sorry, I--"

He put his hand more firmly on my shoulder when I tried to move.

"Careful, you're--"

Then, for a moment, all the world went white with pain; I bit down hard on a very undignified whimper, and felt his hands again, rueful and very gentle as he found the knotted spasming muscles in my throat and shoulder.

"...going to have a hellish crick in your neck," he finished with a sigh, rubbing with great care, but just then everything hurt. "I take back what I said. You have no business being a doctor if you're this great a fool."

When I could breathe again, and very, very gingerly sat up straight to return my head to something approximating the proper angle, I wheezed, "Then you'll have to keep me after all, won't you."

"No help for it, I suppose..." He watched me for a moment, with his head tilted to one side, and then reached over to touch my hair again. "You're rumpled. I didn't know you _could_ be rumpled."

"You needn't sound as though it were the eighth wonder of the world, sir," I said, rather tartly, still trying to find out what actually was the correct alignment of my head. 

Master Cain chuckled, and reached over to his desk for a comb. I was still too stiff to move, so I surrendered to his ministrations, because it would have hurt too much just then if I had tried to object that he was not to serve his servant. 

He had a scientist's hands, deft and precise and gentle. "You really are an idiot, you know," he said, as he tried to salvage the mess of my hair. "You didn't have to go to _that_ length to teach me a lesson; I'm not that slow on the uptake."

"What was your lesson, then, sir?" I asked.

He rapped the comb against my head lightly, and tossed it back onto the desk. "You will give me anything I ask for, whether or not you should," he said. "So I must learn to be more careful in what I ask of you."

"That was not the lesson I had in mind, sir."

"Would you not?" he asked, gazing at me steadily; the sun glancing through his golden eyes made it look as though they were lit from within by some hidden fire. "Did you not? I asked you not to leave; you took that much too literally, and I am quite certain it was on purpose. Would you not give me anything I asked of you?"

"You already know that I would, sir," I replied quietly.

"And so I must learn to be much more careful in what I ask." He shifted a little, and made a face. "My leg is completely asleep too..."

I took a breath to try again, to try to guide him toward realizing for himself what I had intended to offer him with the reminder of presence and concern; but just then the housekeeper knocked at the partially-open door perfunctorially, and walked in with a tray, and gave me a particular glare for not seeing to it that the usual order was kept. In her world, people slept in beds on schedule, and woke and dressed on schedule, so that they would arrive for breakfast on schedule; and crises of the soul should be scheduled so that they would not interfere with breakfast.

Perhaps that observation was unfair of me; or perhaps the housekeeper simply had less patience than I with crises of the soul, which, to be fair to her, were an all-too-frequent event in this house. In any case, the opportunity had been lost, and so I sighed a bit and stood to resume my place and my duties as a servant.

One of my duties for the day was to go and assist Althea with moving to the cottage at the edge of the woods; it surprised me when Master Cain blithely followed me out to the stables.

"Sir, I'm going back to Miss Althea's camp."

"Of course you are," Master Cain said. "And, of course, I'm going with you."

"Sir...?"

"There are already half a hundred whispered rumors about me, but you are quite an upstanding citizen," he said. "If you were to be seen settling a pregnant woman in a house off away from the village, they might begin to whisper about you; whereas I could hardly care less what else is whispered about me. I dare say it would be no stranger than the truth, at that. So." He pulled on his riding-gloves, and grinned up at me. "Shall we be off to add grist to the rumor mill?"

"Sir, I... we... Miss Althea and I -- we were also to go to the market, to buy clothes more suitable for -- for her condition's continuing increase, and for the baby..."

"So? The last time I checked, no one had issued a ban prohibiting me from entering the place."

The image in my mind of Master Cain selecting a woman's maternity dress was rather appalling, since it involved the application of his own preferences in outer garments to something feminine, and since his own criteria for selecting outer garments seemed to include only two: "black" and "sturdily woven so as to turn a casual thrust of a knife." 

Although he had displayed more suitable taste in frills and lace when shopping for Miss Merry, he tended to dress Miss Merry as a type of large doll; for another adult, I was concerned that he might be -- to put it delicately -- overly practical-minded. The image of Althea's reaction to Master Cain's preferences was just as vivid and uncomfortable. 

I opened my mouth, closed it, reconsidered what I had been about to say, reconsidered again, and finally managed, "I had thought you might find it rather dull, sir."

"Since there are no toxins readily for sale, you mean?" he asked, with a brow quirked sardonically. 

"That will do for a reason, yes," I said, perhaps sounding a bit too relieved that he'd found for himself a different reason why I might hesitate. 

He looked at me for a long minute; I bit the inside of my lip hard and worked on keeping my face straight. 

"Well, then if there are no toxins for sale," he said, "I shall simply need to be more creative to entertain myself, shan't I. Come on, if you're still planning to come." 

Althea was just as startled as I had been, but since she knew him less well, she had fewer reasons to be concerned. All that concerned her was the carriage which would take us to town, and finding a way to settle herself less uncomfortably in it. Her face and hands were slender; it was apparent that she was far from accustomed to carrying such girth, and so roundly thrust forward. 

I took care to steady her as she stepped down from the carriage, because her balance was clearly affected by the weight and prominence of her enlarging womb. 

"Thank you, ox," she said, with a challenging glitter in her dark eyes. 

I sighed to myself, and said gravely, "You're welcome, wench." 

Althea laughed and slapped my arm. "So: the ox hasn't been gelded after all. I like that." To Master Cain, she said, "You like your pets feisty, young master witch-boy?" 

"I like my pets well-behaved," he replied, dry as winter ice. "With you, I can see that there is quite a bit of domestication still to be done. The last man to master you was rather lax." 

She bristled at that, and then realized it was exactly what he had intended. Irritated both with him and with herself, she jerked away from the support of my arm and stalked up the road toward the market. 

Grinning darkly to himself, Master Cain followed; so did I, completely at a loss for what else to do. I could hardly speak to him about misbehavior, let alone for a well-deserved comeback to deliberate baiting. On the other hand, asking her to mend her behavior would be like asking a thistle to come up velvet instead of prickles: both a waste of breath and completely unnatural. 

So I resigned myself to a highly spiced afternoon of shopping. If nothing else, I could console myself with the thought that Master Cain was hardly likely to find himself bored. 

* * *

The first order of business was finding Althea some clothing better suited to her condition, and to its further advancement. Despite her best attempts at concealing it, Master Cain and I had noticed why she wore a shawl about her shoulders: not because of a chill, but because she'd torn a strip out of her skirt and patched it into the back of her bodice, in order to try to close the gap caused by her changing figure. 

As I held open the door of the shop he'd chosen, I couldn't help myself. "Please, sir," I said, "no black." 

"There's nothing wrong with black," he said, somewhat irritably. 

"But for-- for a woman, in such a state--" 

"Whyever not?" he asked, clearly baiting me now. "I've been told that black is slimming." 

"Sir--" My next recourse was going to be begging, and I hesitated to do so in the middle of the street, under the eyes of a dozen passers-by and the ever-sarcastic Althea. "Sir, please..." 

"Yes, yes, fine. Trust me." 

And so I trusted him... largely because, when it came down to it, there was nothing else I could do but trust him, watch, and pray the scene didn't become too bloody. 

Much to my relief, Master Cain showed better taste in women's garments than I had been afraid he might; but to my dismay, Althea's taste was somewhat less tasteful than his. To my further dismay, Master Cain had no hesitation in debating with her on any point she cared to choose. 

Althea kept trying to pull him toward clothing that might have fit her a year ago, but could never fit her as she was then; aside from her rather hopeless yearnings for dresses with tiny corseted waists, she was also drawn to bright floral patterns touched with painted glints of gold and silver. 

"You're buying clothes, woman, not upholstery for a throw-pillow," Master Cain said, and reached toward a different sort of dress entirely. 

Much to my relief, it wasn't black; it was a solid dark wine color which would set off her complexion quite nicely. And it was of an old-fashioned cut, likely considered outmoded these days; but the high empire-waisted design left room in front for a certain roundness to increase. 

Since it was neither floral and gaudy with gilt nor designed for a woman with an eighteen-inch waistline, Althea was bitterly disappointed, and stalked off to look further. 

After much searching and much vocal debate, they came up with three candidates. One of them had a plunging neckline and sharply pointed waistline and a gold-tipped rose petal print, simply because she insisted, and Master Cain rather bluntly informed her the waistline would have to be removed or raised half a foot in order for the dress even to approximate lacing closed over her abdomen. 

Another was his burgundy-colored, empire-waisted selection, simply because he insisted; Althea just as bluntly informed him that she had no desire to go about dressed like an accident with a bulging winesack. 

The third was of a solid, pale green fabric, thickly embroidered with flowers about the collar, but cut in the old high-waisted fashion, and with an inset of lace at the throat which covered more than she wished to cover; I silently prayed that that one would fit, because it was as close as they had been able to come to a compromise, and I dreaded the thought of beginning the search anew at the next store up the road. 

The shop-girl showed Althea to a private alcove in the back of the store to assist her with trying them on for their fit. From her expression, I suspected she also felt as though she ought to do anything short of tearing a hole in the back in order to get that one to fit, and to get us out of her shop. 

The argument was distantly audible, or at least Althea's half of it was; but it seemed that the rose-gilt dress truly couldn't have its seams let out sufficiently to permit one in her condition to wear it. The burgundy one might have fit, if she hadn't loudly refused to set foot in it. So, a few minutes later, they re-emerged, with the shop-girl looking rather battle-haggard and Althea stubbornly holding her chin up, in the spring-green dress with the embroidery. What clearly dismayed her the most was that the drape of the dress fell against her enlarged abdomen so that her roundness was still made visible, and so she was determined to find something else to criticize. 

Tugging at the neckline of the bodice, she complained, "Can't you take off the lace? If I've got to put up with aching like an unmilked cow, at least let me get some use out of showing off the cleavage!" 

"No one puts lace around a cow's udders," Master Cain retorted crisply. "Even if you have no intention of behaving like a lady, I expect to dress you like one." And he reached over and tugged the neckline back up into place. 

She slapped his hand; his eyes narrowed, and he slapped hers right back. 

The shopkeeper's eyes were enormous. She looked up at me with question marks floating in her pupils; with my face burning, I said, "I think I'll wait outside." 

I had only managed two steps toward the door when Master Cain reached over and hooked the handle of his cane under my collar to keep me still. 

"Where do you think you're going?" 

"I... er... it's rather a small shop, sir... and... I thought... a little more space... perhaps...?" 

He simply looked at me, with the imperious, unwavering stare of a hawk. 

Defeated, I mumbled, "I suppose I'll just sit over there, then..."

While his attention was elsewhere, Althea had been readjusting the collar of the dress. He turned around, and noticed, and his eyes narrowed again. This time, rather than touching her, he took a step forward and tilted his head down a bit, to fix his scalding gaze on her deliberate display; his eyes glittered bright in the half-shadows in the shop, as hotly gold as molten steel. 

The battle of wills lasted longer this time, because Althea didn't have to deal with his gaze so directly. It was the poor shopkeeper whose nerve broke first; she fled around to the back of her counter, and busied herself in looking for something. 

Master Cain turned the focus of his irritation on her, for disrupting his silent lesson; Althea made a disdainful sound -- and surreptitiously tugged the bodice up a little, while he wasn't looking, letting her palm rest against her bare skin for a moment, as though the scalding he had given were almost physical. 

I pitied the poor shopkeeper, who kept her head and shoulders buried in the shelves under the counter as she said in a wavering voice, "A corset -- we should find a more proper maternity corset; one must support the, er, the middle, and constrain it, so that one doesn't permit too great an increase..." 

"No," I said, startled despite myself; she hit her head on the shelf when she flinched, and then backed out, and then I had all three of them staring at me, which was quite uncomfortable. "Your pardon, please, but -- no, you mustn't. I mean... I understand the fashion, but please, for the child's sake -- you mustn't bind her abdomen. I've seen too many children who were born with their bones twisted before birth--" 

"Nonsense," the shopkeeper said, a little light-headed with the relief of being freed from Master Cain's regard. "Everyone says that it is far more dangerous to permit the middle area to grow without restraint, and of course anyone of sensitivity would be ashamed to be seen in such a state..." 

"Which 'everyone' says this?" Master Cain asked, far too softly for my comfort; he hadn't yet found a sufficient target for his pent-up irritation. "Couturiers and seamstresses, and the most fashionable people, one would presume?" 

"Yes, of course..." 

"And doctors?" 

"Doctors...?" She blinked a little. "What would doctors know of dressmaking?" 

"I see." He scrawled his signature onto a cheque, flung it onto the counter, and took Althea's arm firmly. "Thank you for your time and services, madam; we've decided upon the one she's wearing at the moment." 

"Let go of me, you--" 

"But the lady's corset--" 

Master Cain's suggestion as to what could best be done with the corset in question was sufficiently unprintable as to shock even Althea into a few moments' silence -- not many, of course, but enough to get her out of the shop still mute and staring at him in bemusement. 

He was in a considerably improved humor after that; he steered Althea into a store where we'd often bought clothing for Miss Merry, and turned her loose with a comment about cows in china shops that got her temper up. She poured a torrent of creatively-worded abuse on his head; he took sly delight in baiting her into verbal duels which, in my estimation, he clearly won through finesse, although in several instances she fancied herself the victor because she hadn't understood his highly-educated and rapier-sharp use of the language. 

It amused him to run her through her full repertoire of insults, curses, and berations, which was quite a bit more extensive than the rest of her vocabulary; he corrected her grammar upon more than one occasion, which inevitably produced another spate of invective -- with both mockingly improved grammar and considerably greater heat. 

Two shops, several children's garments, and a cradle later, I was quite bemused to realize that she had begun to enjoy herself just as much as he had. Althea started a debate with him over how profanity held its weight better when delivered as a natural speaker would, and too much education and grammar simply made one sound as though one didn't know how to swear properly. His attempted linguistic analysis of the best way to structure a string of profanity was met by a fluent example that frankly defied any analysis. 

I began to have concerns that by the end of the day, Master Cain would have decided either to kill her or to propose marriage to her. I was uncertain which prospect unnerved me more deeply. 

I saw to securing the cradle to the carriage, because Master Cain's injured arm would have protested the treatment, and Althea was panting for breath after a particularly virulent round of insults. Her fatigue came from more than the ongoing tete-a-tete, though; we had walked quite a way, more quickly than we might have otherwise because of the heat of their argument. She was leaning heavily on the frame of the carriage, although sheer stubborn pride had egged her on to that point; I was certain that the same pride would cause her to laugh off any suggestion that we might rest for her sake. 

"Master Cain," I called, "could you hold something still for me for a moment?" 

"What?" he asked, coming around to the end of the carriage. 

Much more quietly, I said, "Miss Althea, actually." I knocked my knuckles against the carriage so as to sound occupied for her. 

Master Cain looked over at her again, more sharply this time; his eyes widened for a moment when he realized that her breathless, frustrated exhaustion was due to more than a lost battle of words. "Why didn't that stupid woman _say_ something?" 

"Would you have admitted to weakness in front of a rival, sir?" 

"That's different!" A moment later, he sighed, and said, "No, it's not different, is it... Fine." And he marched back around the edge of the carriage, opened the door, and pushed her toward it firmly. 

"What do you think you're doing?" 

"Lunch," he said. "Unless, of course, you'd prefer we eat without you?" 

Althea caught up a handful of skirts and scrambled with ungainly haste into the carriage. 

* * *

Sheer determination had kept Althea moving all morning, but when given the opportunity to rest, the last of her strength was draining out of her faster than she would ever have wished to admit. She clung to my arm as I escorted her into a local inn which kept a private dining room for the members of the Hargreaves family and their guests; I was careful not to let go of her until she was properly seated on the padded bench along the wall, because it seemed unlikely that her knees would still support her unaided. 

Her eyes lit desperately at the sight of a warm loaf of bread waiting on the table; she tore into it without even waiting for me to slice it, and shoved a handful of it into her mouth; then she sagged back to lean against the wall, blinking at tears of frustration. 

"Miss Althea...?" 

"I'm... so... I'm so tired of being tired...! I'm -- damn it -- this would have been nothing to me, last year, but now I'm so--" She stopped, and gulped hard, and choked, "I'm so heavy, so grotesque, how can you even bear to look at me...? Big as some bloated cow and so damned weak, and so tired...!" 

She put the bread down and slumped forward over the table, burying her face in both hands, shaking with the effort to keep her tears silent, so as not to admit anything more in front of Master Cain and his sardonic golden eyes. 

There was only a soft murmur of fabric to warn me of motion; then Master Cain sat next to her, and gathered her into his arms quietly, and let her rest her weight against him as she sobbed. 

"I should have noticed sooner that I had pushed you past your strength as well as your temper," he murmured. "But also, you should have told me of your exhaustion, rather than driving yourself so much too far. So both of us have a fault to mend, I think." 

"Damn you," she whispered, and thumped a fist weakly against his shoulder. "Damn you and your yellow eyes both -- don't you pity me! Don't you dare..." 

"And what would you do if I did?" he asked, smoothing her tangled curls with a rueful hand. "Unleash another round of profanity laced with truly appalling grammar upon my defenseless ears? I shall have to take care, then." 

"Damn you to hell, you bastard..." 

"You're almost twenty years too late for that, my dear. Try again after lunch." 

It was only a few minutes before a serving girl came to take our order; but in that slight a time, Althea's exhaustion had defeated her, and she was deeply asleep in his arms. I asked the girl to prepare tea and sandwich-makings and three bowls of the day's stew, but to wait for me to come and fetch her rather than to disturb us. Then I quietly tugged the table back a little, and helped Master Cain settle Althea more comfortably, lifting her feet onto the bench and taking a pillow from another chair so that we could settle her head into his lap. 

With a light and rueful hand resting against the unruly mess of her dark curls, Master Cain said to me wryly, "This seems to be quite a day for being slept upon. Perhaps I should ask the barmaid if she has plans for the evening." 

"If she follows the current fashion, sir," I replied, very much on my dignity, "you should first ask if her plans include a reasonable period of consciousness." 

"An excellent point, at that." 

I brought a tray with tea and the makings of lunch to wait for Althea to wake, and busied myself slicing some of the untorn bread to assemble meat and cheese sandwiches beside the stew. It seemed that her body cried for food nearly as desperately as rest; the scent of the warm vegetable stew had her blinking fuzzily in a few minutes, but sitting up was beyond her in her still-exhausted haze, and she made a small tired sound of dismay. 

Master Cain cut one of the sandwiches into smaller pieces, and held a bit to her lips; she glared up at him and bit his fingers along with it. Perfectly satisfied with that outcome, he fed her the rest one bite at a time, and then looked at his abused fingers. 

"I should have dipped my hands in vinegar first. I've heard that it's quite effective in teaching ill-mannered pups not to bite." 

"And what of ill-tempered bitches?" she muttered, struggling to find the strength to sit up. 

"We shall have to try it next time, I suppose." He leaned a palm against the side of her head. "Lie down. The stew can wait for later." 

"The next lesson being 'roll over'?" 

"Oh, that's later too," he said, with a malicious glitter of glee dancing in his eyes. "Right now the lesson is 'play dead.' Go on. Close your eyes..." 

She did, more than half despite herself. "The poisoner says 'play dead'... that's disturbing." 

"That's right," he replied. "And you have to make quite a good pretense to fool me. And so I bid you good night; or at the least, good afternoon." 

So Master Cain and I had a quiet lunch, in order not to disturb Althea. Despite the fierce words, she lay very still in her sleep, through utter exhaustion. On the other hand, I knew from experience that asking Master Cain to remain still for long periods of time without something to focus his attention was an exercise in futility. If his mind was not occupied with some roving question, then the rest of him made up for it; so I pulled a well-used pack of cards out of my inner pocket and shuffled them. 

I also knew from experience that Master Cain was deeply unnerving to play poker against; I unrepentantly dealt for piquet instead. 

* * *

We had finished one game and begun another by the time Althea stirred again, well over an hour later. The remaining stew was quite cold, but when Master Cain wryly offered her another bit of sandwich, she bit him hard enough to make him yelp. Then she pushed herself far enough upright to lean on his shoulder and the wall for support, rather than lying in his lap. 

"The bitch hasn't learned her lesson at all, has she," she said sourly, around a mouthful of sandwich. 

"You play dead quite well," he replied, setting down his cards. "I would suggest not to be too assiduous in improving that skill. Obedience, however..." 

Her reply was brief, pithy, and anatomically challenging to imagine; Master Cain laughed. 

"Speaking of which, I recall that we were to resume your training with 'roll over'..." 

The next reply was even more physiologically questionable. I hoped that the lamplight didn't show off my blushes as warmly as I felt them. 

"I'm quite serious, you realize," he said. "When you've finished devouring that poor defenseless piece of cow, lie on your back so that Riff can examine you properly." 

I was duly informed about my ancestors' questionable mating habits with assorted barnyard animals. But then Master Cain clamped a hand over her mouth, so fiercely that his knuckles were white with the pressure; her eyes rolled sideways toward him, in startlement that was tangled into outright fear. 

"Mock me all you wish," he said, very softly. "Hate me all you wish; call me any sort of villain you might imagine. Riff is here in my service, and for your comfort, and you will take care to speak to him with a civil tongue in your head." 

He let her go then; a little shaken, she said, "And if I don't?" 

"Oh, but you _will._" 

His tone brooked no argument whatsoever. Althea looked away, and said, "I will not lie about being prodded like a broodmare..." 

"That is a different matter entirely," Master Cain said. "Riff, do you make a habit of prodding broodmares?" 

"Er... no, sir, not as such..."

"There, you see?" He patted the bench invitingly, as though she were a puppy which might need enticement. "Lie down and roll over." 

Master Cain was heatedly and extensively informed of several generations of his ancestors' questionable mating habits with creatures less savory than barnyard animals. 

"For all I know, you may be quite right," he told her gaily, bending down to take her ankles and swing her feet back up to the bench. "After all, they were noble; and nobility becomes bored, inbred, and insane with depressing regularity. Lie back." 

She tried to kick him, but couldn't get the leverage when he was leaning all his weight into her ankles; instead she saw to blistering the air at length. 

"Master Cain," I said, uncomfortable, "if she objects so strenuously..." 

"She's just being stubborn." 

"Yes, sir," I said. "And so are you." 

"Well, yes. But I dare say I'm quite a bit more stubborn than she is!" 

"And if that isn't the devil's own truth," she spat, then turned a pleading look on me. "For the love of God -- you've already poked at me once; isn't that good enough? Don't humiliate me just because you can, you big ox." 

"I certainly don't wish to humiliate you," I said, taken aback. "It's simply a wise precaution, to permit a doctor to examine you often, as your pregnancy grows more advanced. If the child turns awkwardly in the womb, the labor can be much more difficult; but if the child can be encouraged to turn again and to rest properly before the labor starts, with a combination of stretching and careful manipulation..." 

"Shut up," she said aggrievedly, and dug a hand through her hair, and tried again to kick at Master Cain. "What are you going to do, poke at me again?" 

"Well, yes. But also, if you will permit it, I would like to listen for the child's heartbeat." 

She stopped struggling then, looking up at me in surprise. "You can hear that? I mean, I thought... don't they only start to live once they're born and take a breath?"

"You've felt the movements for yourself," I replied. "Even in the womb, they wake and sleep, and move, and kick, and play, and their hearts beat independently of the mother's. All that remains is that first breath; but even now, your child is quite truly alive." 

Althea looked down at her midsection for a startled moment, and then up at me. 

"Would you like to hear your baby's heart beating?" I offered, careful to speak gently and softly, so that she might not bristle and pull away again. 

She shot a defensive look at Master Cain; but she saw no mockery in him at all, just the same startled wonder. After all, he had said himself that he studied life's thousands of different endings, not its single fragile beginning. 

After another self-conscious and wary look at Master Cain, who still showed no sign of mocking her for such a moment of vulnerability, Althea let herself nod -- just a little. "What do I do...?" 

"Just a moment," I said. "I left my stethoscope in the carriage, with the rest of my supplies." 

Once I was safely out of the room, I let myself run for the carriage, and grabbed the whole bag rather than spend time searching for the stethoscope; I ran all the way back, hoping that their fierce personalities hadn't managed to set off more sparks during the brief interval in which I left them unsupervised together. When I returned, though, the scene hadn't changed; Master Cain was holding Althea's ankles on the bench and glowering at her, and she was propping herself upright on two locked elbows and glowering right back. 

I bit back a sigh of relief as I opened my bag and took out the stethoscope, and cupped the bell between my hands to warm it before it was placed against her belly. "Sir," I said, "I believe Miss Althea will be more comfortable if she can stretch out her feet as she pleases." 

He let her go then, and stepped back with a sardonic flourish of a hand; I took a tablecloth off an unused table and turned a chair around to sit beside her. 

It was an awkward business to tuck the tablecloth over her lap for the preservation of modesty while gathering up the skirts of her dress sufficiently to bare her abdomen. I hadn't realized Master Cain was watching until I heard him take a sharp startled breath; he reached down over my shoulder to point. 

"What...? --why...?" 

"And you tell me _I've_ got no sense of modesty!" she hissed, her cheeks blotchy crimson beneath her tanned skin. "Ox, do something about him--" 

"What's wrong with her?" Master Cain asked, fiercely. 

I held up both hands, trying to avert an all-out shouting scene. "Nothing's wrong with her," I said. "It's natural late in pregnancy to have marks of striation." In response to a blank stare from Althea, I amended, "Your skin has needed to stretch quite a bit, quite quickly, and the strain leaves marks. Some children have marks like this on their knees and hips, if they grow tall particularly quickly. They'll fade in time, after the birth. It may also help to rub salve into your abdomen; I'll apply some after the examination..." 

"Get on with it, then." She looked away, both hands knotted in the fabric of her skirts, in an embarrassment so acute it seemed almost physically painful. 

I looked up at Master Cain, who seemed oblivious to the fact that he should have left the room or at least turned away rather than standing there watching intently. Since I couldn't think of a graceful way to say so, particularly not in front of her, I sighed a little and turned my attention to my examination. 

Her abdomen was greatly distended; it was both natural and inevitable, late in her third trimester of pregnancy. The curve of her womb was a bit asymmetrical; she carried the baby high and heavily forward, with a slight prominence toward the left side. A few moments' careful palpation of her womb revealed that the prominence was due to the baby's spine; it was resting with its back to the left, which made no particular difference to me. But its head was lowered toward her hips, which was a relief at this late a stage of pregnancy. 

However, because the baby's back was resting outward, I couldn't be completely certain that she carried only one; another might have been able to rest behind it, cradled against her spine and concealed by the arch of her ribs and its sibling. Twins could explain both her discomfort from the strength of the movements within and her visibly strained and uncomfortable girth; but then, so would one particularly large and strong baby, since she was not a tall or large-boned woman. 

I cupped a hand against her right side and then pressed fingertips against the baby's back on the left, to try to encourage a shift in position; Althea gasped as it stretched and kicked and rolled to its other side within her. But I felt no corresponding movement on the right before the baby shifted itself to that side; if there was a twin, it was much smaller, to be able to rest so completely behind its forward-canted sibling. Such things were not unheard of, when one of the children took more of its mother's strength than the other; but twins were statistically unlikely. It seemed most probable that she carried only the one child. 

The baby seemed clearly to prefer resting with its back outwards; that tendency made it much simpler for me to locate the sound of its heartbeat, and I curved my hand over the bell of the stethoscope so that I could feel if the baby turned away while someone else listened. Then I offered the ear-pieces to Althea. 

"Your heartbeat is the deeper sound, and slower. The child's is very light and quick. You may also hear the movement of fluids within the womb, as the child floats within you in a cushion of waters. Tell me if you can't hear it; I'll try to find a clearer place for you to listen." 

She hesitated for a moment, then snatched the earpieces out of my hands and put them in her ears. 

Althea listened for a long, silent moment. Unwilling to place any pressure upon her which might cause her to pull away again, I tried to look busy and unintimidating; I opened a jar of salve one-handed and cradled it in my palm to try to warm it, so that the chill would not startle her when it was applied to her skin. 

"Would you like that warmed?" Master Cain asked softly, and startled us both; Althea sniffed and looked away. 

"Yes, sir," I said, "but it's not critical." 

He took the jar from me, set it in an empty teacup, and carefully poured hot tea around the outside of the jar. 

For years I had taken a certain pride in keeping my voice as calm as possible through Master Cain's more unusual displays of innovation; this time was no different. "Novel, sir. And, I should imagine, likely quite effective... is this a technique you use often in your own chemical explorations?" 

"Hardly," he said, with a wry quirk at the corner of his mouth. "This is based on a distillate of white petroleum, isn't it? Foul-tasting if a bit gets spilled, but not hazardous, and simple enough to clean. I know quite a few of my compounds would bond too much with any imperfection in a ceramic glaze, and react to light; the only safe way to handle them is while sealed in dark glass, preferably air-tight. I wouldn't dare put something like that in a teacup that would be used again." 

"Do the two of you talk shop all the time?" Althea asked tartly, putting the earphones aside. "What fascinating dinner conversation that must make. 'Ox, I've forgotten, is that bottle your smelling-salts or my vitriol? Let's try it on the maid and see.'" 

"Master Cain has never experimented on the help," I said carefully. 

"Not on the help, no," he agreed. "On hens that were about to go into the stew pot, and dogs in the yard, and barn-mice. And occasionally houseguests. But not the help!" His grin held more than a hint of sweet sly malice, because she looked more startled than she wanted to be. "So, you see, it's much safer to be in my employ! Speaking of which -- I believe your past master's training regimen had hit a bit of a rut with 'roll over'...?" 

Over an atmosphere-coloring string of profanity, I said, "Master Cain, was it completely necessary to agitate her when I've not yet finished?" 

"Here, let me dry the jar for you." He fished it out of the hot tea gingerly, and wrapped it in a napkin so that the hot glass would be bearable to hold. Then, despite himself, he said, "The stethoscope--? If she's finished with it...?" 

Althea glared up at him, all but incoherent with indignation. "Call me a beached whale and talk over my head like a dog and then expect me to smile and curtsey for you? Have you been getting into the ox's pharmaceuticals yourself, you pompous, arrogant, egotistic--" 

"May I?" he asked quietly. 

Althea stopped her tirade short, startled. She struggled between the effort to maintain outrage and sheer deflated astonishment for a long moment; then she looked away, scowling at the wall fiercely enough to singe the stone. 

"Do as you like; you will anyway." But despite the surly tone, she held out the earpieces to me, and added in a nearly inaudible mumble, "It moved again, so..." 

After a few minutes' searching, I relocated the baby's heartbeat, and offered the stethoscope to Master Cain. He took it quietly, and bent his head and closed his eyes in order to focus his attention on listening. 

For once he looked his own age; he wasn't yet even of full legal majority, and the vulnerability in him at that particular moment reminded me strikingly of the boy he had been a decade earlier. In truth, he was still younger than one would expect; the bright brittle cynicism he maintained had aged him mentally if not physically, and he hardly seemed childlike with his guard up and the sharp-edged and wary brilliance held as a shield between himself and the rest of the world. But here and now, he was a very young man intent on observing a quiet wonder, with no sarcasm and no defensiveness at all; at times like this, it was easier to see in him the kindness of the child he had been, and of the man he might have become under happier circumstances. Althea stared at him as though this hushed and respectfully gentle person had been shipped in from some utterly foreign land, and she wasn't certain what to do about the sudden replacement of the Master Cain she was accustomed to. 

I could have explained, if I'd felt like it; I could have asked her to reflect on her own sharp sarcastic defenses, and whether she thought she was the only person in the world to have been so badly used, and to be so in need of protection for a brutally savaged heart. But it would have disturbed the silence, and the child's heartbeat could be difficult to hear under the best of circumstances; so I kept my silence and dipped my fingertips in the now-warmed salve, and began to apply it to the marks of striation upon her abdomen. 

I felt it almost as clearly as Althea did, when the child kicked and moved restlessly again; she bit her lip hard to keep from crying out in pain, and Master Cain reached over to take one of her hands so that she would have something to cling to. When she could breathe again without whimpering, he said, "Perhaps the baby dislikes resting against your backbone. Do you think you'd feel more comfortable on your side?" 

"Like some beached whale," she muttered, glaring anywhere but at the two of us. "No thank you." 

Stung, he pulled back, and made an irrelevant business of polishing the bell of the stethoscope; he reached toward my bag with it, and I said, "Just a moment, sir." 

"What for?" 

"Well, we've listened to the child's heart, but I should still like to check Miss Althea's own." 

"What do you care about me?" she asked. "Either of you? All he wants is the baby." 

Master Cain took a sharp breath; I jumped in hastily, before he could start another incendiary argument that would char the rafters. "You are a person in your own right, in addition to a child's mother, and as a medical student I have a duty to see to both you and the child," I told her. "That is, if you will permit it." 

She grumbled and groused and glowered, but permitted me to help her sit up and straighten the gown; I timed her pulse with fingertips to her wrist, and checked her throat for swollen glands which might indicate some infection or other undue strain. I hesitated a moment over how to listen for fluid in the lungs, since her abdomen was roundly in the way, and settled on the expedient of listening to her back. Her reflexes were fine; when I set my palms under her feet and asked her to push, she gleefully did her best to knock me down, but it was enough to ascertain that the child's presence wasn't pressing on any of the nerves in her legs or causing undue difficulties with circulation. Her ankles were somewhat swollen, which was only natural after as much walking as we'd done that morning. 

Finally, there was nothing left for it but to listen to her heart; and I completely froze. I scolded myself madly in the silence of my mind: _you're almost a doctor; be professional! Why does a medical gown make it that much easier for you when there's actually more fabric in the way?_

_Because then it doesn't feel like I'm sampling goods offered by a woman putting herself on display to encourage the purchase of favors which I have no business knowing about, _I answered myself, too promptly for the sake of winning the argument from the side I wished to win, and I flailed for a different angle to take with reproaching myself.

Althea tilted her head to one side, evidently relishing every moment of my discomfort. "Well?" 

I couldn't move; I sat there with my hands in my lap, twisting the cable of the stethoscope around one finger pointlessly. 

To Master Cain, Althea said, "For such an overgrown beast, your ox is remarkably cute at times, you know. The blushing is adorable." 

She bent closer to me, to provide a better view, and she took a deep breath. I shut my eyes in scalding embarrassment; she chuckled, and patted my hand. "Completely adorable. Perhaps it's good that I never had a taste for virgin calf on the hoof; I'd eat the poor thing alive..." 

"Stop tormenting him," Master Cain said, irritated; he reached over and took the stethoscope out of my hands. "What should I listen for?" 

"It's all right," I said, now doubly humiliated, and took the stethoscope back. "If there's an irregularity to the rhythm, or a certain echo... I can't describe it. Never mind, sir..." I hoped that my hand's shaking wasn't too visible as I touched the stethoscope to Althea's breast. 

She put her hand over mine; I must have jumped about half a foot, because she burst into gales of laughter. 

"Althea," Master Cain said, with a clear warning in his voice. 

"But I'm trying to help! I swear to heaven I am--!" She scrubbed laugh-tears off her cheeks and took the bell of the stethoscope in a hand that was shaking nearly as much as mine had, although for an entirely different reason; then she quite primly set it against the pulse-point of her heart for me. "See? I can be a good girl. I really can! See?" 

Except, of course, that she ruined her innocent impression when another fit of giggles won free. If nothing else, it made it hard to hear her heart's rhythm. But I was hardly qualified to speak to her about controlling herself, so I bit my lip and tried to listen. 

"I don't understand," Althea said, still shivering with half-suppressed giggles. "I mean, every woman in the world has breasts. But a belly like this only comes from sex; there's no other way to get yourself into this state, after all. So why is it you're fine with examining my belly but not my--" 

"It's a question of intent," I said miserably, hunched over the stethoscope's ear pieces. "The baby is just... a medical condition to be observed, and innocent; your dress's collar is... um... not. Distinctly not... um... innocent." 

She dissolved into hilarity again. Master Cain levelled a scathing glare upon her, then reached over and shook the folds out of a napkin and put it over her bodice. It was humiliating to have to admit even to myself how such a simple gesture helped steady me. 

"I told you the garment was indecent enough to suit your lack of standards even with the lace," he said to her. 

"Oh, for the love of God, don't even pretend to tell me you'd call _him_ a reliable barometer of men's responses to a woman's cleavage," she said. "I wasn't kidding about virgin calf on the hoof! --I dare you," she added, reaching over to poke me in the ribs. "Tell me you're not. And watch me laugh in your face..." 

"In that case, why should anyone bother telling you anything?" Master Cain shot back; I held up a hand weakly. 

"Please," I said, "please, both of you, just one minute of silence so I can actually hear...? Please...?" 

They glared at each other, then turned away to glare at opposing walls, in perfect synchronization; however, I valued my life more than I valued the potential entertainment in making the observation aloud in the vicinity of their combined tempers. And it gave me the peaceful moment I needed to listen for any irregularities in Althea's heart. 

That brief, merciful silence was, alas, too good to last. "Well?" Althea asked, drumming fingertips against the table. 

"Your heart is fine," I said. "If anything, I think your face and hands are a bit too thin for your advanced state, but rest and proper nuitrition should help compensate. You've tired yourself too greatly this morning, but if you take care to rest with your feet up as much as possible this afternoon, it's unlikely to cause any serious harm. Your child is strong and spirited; of course, you yourself can tell that much..." 

"Like mother, like child?" Master Cain guessed. 

Althea glared at him, then at me. "So I'm free?" 

"You were never captive," Master Cain said tartly. 

"I beg your pardon; who was it using all his strength to keep me trapped here just a few minutes ago?" 

"You were never captive," Master Cain repeated, as though to a particularly dim-witted pupil. "You were being medically examined for your own good, since you clearly lack the sense to see to such things of your own will." 

"Hah! You jumped-up sneering blue-blooded bastard, you go around twisting words to suit whatever strikes your fancy, and never mind the truth--" 

I made myself busy repacking my stethoscope and the salve, and took notes on her pulse and my other observations. Just to be on the safe side, I wrote in Latin, so that even if she felt tempted to light-finger my notes she wouldn't have much amusement from it. And if Master Cain availed himself of my notes, he would hardly fault me for some less-censored observations than were strictly professional; however, one of my instructors had an Austrian correspondent with a penchant for theorizing that traits of personality were inbred. I thought it highly likely that the man would _adore_ the opportunity to meet this woman's child in about ten years. 

"Ox," Althea said, abruptly. 

I sighed, and put my notes into my inner pocket, and said, "My name is Riff." 

"Whatever," she said. "You said the marks would go away some...? How much?" 

"Vain, are we?" Master Cain mused. 

"Fine words from a man who never looks in a mirror! What are you, a bloodsucking vampire? What are you doing out in public in the middle of the day?"

To forestall the rest of that argument, I quietly rolled up the cuff of my pantleg so that I could show her the old, whitely faded marks on my own knees. "When I was about fifteen, I spent most of six months crying myself to sleep because of how my knees hurt while I was growing," I said. "I'm in my twenties now. The marks faded in less than a year, but whether or not they'll vanish entirely depends on how prone your skin is to scarring..." 

Sounding startled, Master Cain said, "I never knew that." Then he cuffed me across the shoulder. "Why did you never mention that?"

"Your father gave me to you three years later," I replied. "It didn't hurt as much by then." To Althea, I said, "Remind me to leave the salve with you when we get to the cottage." 

"So what are we waiting for?" Althea leaned heavily on the table as she pushed herself to her feet and set off for the doorway. 

"I am not a vampire," Master Cain said, looking away. "What do I need a mirror for? You cut my hair; you tend to the rest of it for me. I trust your taste." 

_I tend your hair for you because you have always hated the sight of your own poor despised eyes, Master Cain, even though they are as they are through no fault of your own. _"As you say, sir." 

"Shouldn't I trust your taste?" he demanded. 

"Of course you should, sir." 

"Well, then." He glared at Althea's shoulderblades. "A vampire, indeed..." 

For a moment, I envied the carriage-horse, which had only been asked to bring the carriage to town and back, and need care nothing for the tempers and slights of those it transported. This had already been a much longer day than any decent twenty-four hours should have contained. 

* * *

Compared to the rest of the day, seeing Althea returned to the cottage and settled in was practically restful. Of course, she had opinions on where each thing should be placed, and found great amusement in directing 'the ox' in the rearrangement of the furniture to suit the cradle. Master Cain offered his assistance, but I set him to folding clothes and putting away kitchen supplies instead of furniture-moving; it would have hurt his still-fresh wounds to lift a bed or a chair. 

Finally, though, Althea ran herself out of both suggestions and her remaining energy; she'd fallen asleep in the rocking-chair by the time I finished cleaning the windows. 

It took some doing to convince Master Cain that the proper disposal of used cleaning-rags was not 'artistically draped in a vase in the middle of the table,' even for amusement. Sometimes, he was purely a teenaged boy despite it all. 

I tried the logical approach. "But you won't be here to see her reaction..." 

"That doesn't matter; I can _imagine_ her reaction!" He'd found a vase left on the back of a shelf by some previous inhabitant, and was busily dusting it off. 

"Then can you appease yourself with just the imagining, and leave the deed itself undone?" 

"But it's no fun if I know she won't actually see it." 

"Since you've done such a fine job with that vase," I offered, rather desperately, "it would be a shame to spoil your efforts; I'll go and bring some flowers from the forest." And I dashed out before he could stop me. 

Once the flowers had been gathered, of course, there was nowhere else to put them but in the vase. Master Cain sighed, although softly, glancing over at Althea's sleeping form; then he made a wry business of folding the used cleaning-rags into a complicated little flower-pattern and set them beside the vase. I surrendered to the compromise, and shooed him outside, and closed the door very quietly. 

Under ordinary circumstances, I wasn't often reminded so forcefully of how unlike a normal teenager he was; but on the rare occasions when he did revert to a mental age closer to his physical age, it was rather startling. Master Cain was full of questions during the trip back -- from my perspective, both unexpectedly and rather uncomfortably. He seemed to have taken the notion that, since I had been a medical student, I must therefore know everything that could possibly be asked about a woman's pregnancy and its development. 

"You're certain she isn't going to -- I don't know -- burst a seam or something...?" 

"No, sir, I'm quite confident she won't," I said, staring fixedly out at the road. 

"But... she's quite full already; and you say she'll grow bigger still before the child comes...? She already felt quite full to me, when I felt the child moving. Nothing at all like an overweight person; so astonishingly, snugly round... and those marks..." 

"They are only from the stretching, sir. I assure you she is in no particular danger of, er, 'bursting a seam.'" 

"Remarkable..." 

I thought that perhaps, mercifully, he had sated his curiosity for a time; it turned out to be a vain hope. "How do you know she won't burst?" 

"Sir... women don't have seams." 

He gave me a half-lidded glower. "I know that. I mean -- who's documented this? Has there been a study made of what size a woman must be in order for her body to successfully support a certain girth, a certain size of child?" 

Taken aback, I said, "I don't know of any, sir." I carefully restrained myself from adding, _Most men still have more respect for propriety than to invade a childing woman's privacy in such an embarrassing fashion. _

"It would make the most sense to study women who go without corseting, of course, so that the data would not be skewed... and if that ridiculous shopgirl is any indication, those must be harder to come by than one would hope. Indigenes, perhaps? And the Hindus in India; perhaps one of our colonial outposts would be better suited to such a study."

"Master Cain... I rather suspect the colonial outposts are more concerned with ruling the natives than with scientific inquiries." 

"Well, then -- women breed in every continent, of course; Althea herself is too far along to examine more than the end of the development, but the next time some incautious village girl gets herself into some trouble, I should imagine that she could be deprived of a corset without much difficulty, and the process of her enlargement measured and recorded from its beginning, in more natural detail... there is a photographer in these parts, is there not? If one were to put the man on retainer, and document the changes in her body each fortnight or so..." 

I tried not to let my horror at such a proposal show too clearly. Master Cain's upbringing had been unconventional, to say the least, and it had been aristocratic as well. He was far from a typical aristocrat, and yet he had still been given both their blood and their education. 

And the fundamental concept behind aristocracy held that unlike the Americans' precept, all men were _not_ created equal. In order for an aristocrat to exist, other people had to be born in lesser positions, and there had to be a wide-spread agreement that those other people were lesser people: people of lesser value than the aristocrat. 

In these times, it was impolitic to say so aloud; and yet, whatever trappings one wished to pretty it with, inequality of birth, of status, and of value was a fundamental part of the concept of nobility. And so when an aristocrat's deep-seated belief that 'lesser-born people were people of less value' intersected with a scientist's desire for pure analytical observation, untainted by such illogical, emotional factors as 'propriety' or 'compassion' or 'civility to one's test subjects'... 

All in all, I found myself wishing he had decided to make an afternoon's treatise of dosages of strychnine instead; at least when he spoke of poisons, I could be assured that he would not make other humans the objects of his experiments whether or not those humans had been asked for their cooperation. I found the whole conversation deeply unsettling, and struggled to place a finger on the reason. 

If nothing else, I was _accustomed_ to Master Cain making an afternoon's treatise of poisons. This was rather unprecedented... 

No; this was _entirely_ unprecedented, I realized, with something of a shock. Until now, I had only seen Master Cain turn the brilliant focus of his mind on the moment of passage between life and death: poisons, cases of murder, seeking out the villains who hurt or killed others, charting out the border between the realm of being and the realm of non-being. 

Today, perhaps for the first time in his life, Master Cain had turned that fierce attention on something that was its polar opposite -- the border of life's beginnings rather than its ends; the division between void and creation; pregnancy, the beginnings of new life, with a varied and fascinating future ahead of it, rather than death and partings and endings. 

I felt rather like a proud but bewildered father watching my treasured one take his first steps in a direction I had never expected. On the one hand, I resolved to do everything in my power to encourage him in the idea that life could be just as fascinating as death, and indeed rather more so. On the other hand, while I had been lost in thought, Master Cain's speculations had taken a more alarming turn. 

"What do you think, Riff? Like a workhouse, only not at all for work -- for the care and supervision, and of course the study, of unwed mothers-to-be -- I dare say the city would have a superfluity of them, at that. And in such a state they are unsuited to the workhouses; we would be doing the government a favor, even." 

"Are you proposing a breeding stable for humans, sir?" I asked, somewhat numbly; then I shook my head and said, "Let me amend -- I would suggest that one should _not_ propose a breeding stable for humans. I would, er, quite strongly suggest that." 

"But I know that thousands of women die in childbirth each year; if such a place could pursue a more scientific study of the development and likely outcomes--"

"Sir, this is why we have hospitals."

He sighed, visibly frustrated, and looked away. "But women die of this," he said, "and children too. And I am not such a credulous child as to ask you to promise me that Althea and her child will be well, because right now science has not progressed far enough to make that promise possible. And yet I want so badly to know--" He stopped himself short, abruptly, knotting both gloved hands in the fabric of his coat. 

"Master Cain...?" 

He made a sound that could have been meant for a laugh, if it hadn't been so softly unhappy. 

"Part of me still is that credulous child," he admitted. "Part of me wants to be able to ask you if it'll really be all right -- if she'll bear the child safely, if I truly can be trusted with a child given all the madness in my life -- I want to know whether it's safe to wish for this, because whether it's safe or not, I _do_ wish it so desperately... and yet my wishes are such a danger to anyone for whom I wish." 

I reined the carriage-horses in sharply, and turned to take him by the shoulders. 

"It's _not your fault_," I said. "Delilah, your father, that mad doctor -- all that's happened to you, to those around you -- _none_ of it is your fault!" 

"It doesn't need to be my fault in order to be true," he said, low-pitched. "And it hardly takes a mathematical genius to recognize the pattern: anyone who comes near me comes near danger which has too often been fatal." 

"Master Cain--" 

"In truth," he murmured, "I should still send you away to that medical school. Because you would be far safer there than you are here with me; you and I both know it."

Despite it all, I was only his servant, not his father or his brother; I had no right to reach out and hold him and try to comfort the wounds torn into his heart as well as his body. But for once, I didn't care. This was neither the manor nor the village; no one else could see us; and so I silently cursed decorum to the nethermost hells and took him into my arms. 

Master Cain's eyes widened in a moment's astonishment, and he took a startled breath; I put a fingertip to his lips, shaking, and held him close, and rested my cheek against the crown of his dark hair so that I wouldn't need to see it if the astonishment shifted to offense at my presumption. 

"You are _never,_" I murmured, "_never _going to be rid of me so easily. Never. I have my own free will, you see, and unless you have me taken to the Tower in chains -- no matter where you try to send me away, I will come back to you. I promised you. My life is yours. All that I am is yours. I don't care whether it's 'safe' or not. And I will spend the rest of my life at your side, and I swear that I will teach you that it's all right to wish for happiness. Those sick and twisted fools cannot possibly destroy everything in your life. As your servant and as a man, I _refuse _to permit that."

"Riff--" 

"She's just a tramp," I said, desperately, still clinging to him. "She's a tramp who's gotten herself a bellyful of trouble. To your father and his minions -- she is completely beneath their notice. She is not a rich aristocrat with few or no heirs, to be killed and to leave them power or land or money. What on earth could they gain from her but an earful of foul language? What would they gain from her child but a pile of soiled laundry? No one has died. No one has been injured. No one has even been threatened. They aren't so omnipresent as to be able to taint and ruin every moment of peace in your life. And I swear before heaven that I _will_ make you learn to trust in that." 

His hands knotted fiercely in the fabric of my shirt; I could feel him trembling. His voice shook badly as he murmured, "I am nothing but a credulous child after all; I want so badly to be able to believe you, but I know that is a promise you cannot make..." 

"Yes it is," I replied, holding him tight. "I cannot promise that Althea and her child will be unharmed, because no one on earth can make that promise. But the only danger that will come to her comes to every woman on earth at such a time -- it has nothing to do with you, or with your father's curse. She is simply a gravid woman drawing near to her term, and when that time comes, not even your father's madness can do a thing to change it. Neither Alexis nor Dr. Disraeli nor any other man in the world -- no one can change the simple fact that when it is her time, she will come to her childbed and must bear it with her own strength or not at all. You know that as well as I do. Believe it. Believe me. The only danger facing her is the danger she carries within her own body. It has _nothing _to do with you." 

He gave a soft, half-muffled chuckle. "It's good to hear that they haven't taken the power of life as well as death, but the rest of it is not entirely reassuring. --I wanted you to tell me that she and the child would simply be fine." 

"All I can tell you is the truth," I said. "You know it yourself. You know what promises I cannot make, and what I can. I cannot _promise_ she will bear the child safely. But as a student of medicine, I can tell you that she has a very, very good chance. She's strong, and young, and healthy, and you yourself have had a taste of her determination when she puts her mind to something. She's not a large woman, but from my examinations, I don't think the child is too large for her to bear. In all honesty, I think nothing will go wrong. I think it is likely I'll be taught several new levels of profanity over the course of her labor, and then she will bear her child, and that will be that. The only thing I cannot give you is an absolute promise. But I will give you every assurance short of it, sir." 

Finally, I could feel some of the tension in his body starting to ease. "So I have your promise's next of kin, then?" 

"Something of the sort, yes, Master Cain." 

"I'll be holding you to it, you know." 

"I would expect nothing else, sir, since I have given you nothing but the truth." 

He sighed a little, and dug a hand through his hair; still resting his head against my heart, he said, "What on earth are we going to tell Merry?" 

"The same thing that you told Miss Althea, sir," I said. "You've found a new brother or sister, one in need of a loving home and family." 

"She can get terribly jealous, though. For heaven's sake, look at what happens whenever I have so much as a conversation with a woman." 

"Miss Merry adores you," I said. "She wants to know that she'll always have her place in your heart. If we put it to her that now she'll be the big sister whom the baby adores, just as she adores you -- I think she'll be delighted once she understands it that way."

"I'll tell her it's just like a better version of a doll," Master Cain mused. "One that can play back, and one she can teach to talk to her when it grows up some. That ought to get her interest."

"Yes, sir," I said dutifully, struggling to suppress the memory of Merry's voodoo-housekeeper liberally bedecked with hatpins. "I'm sure it will." 

(part 3 coming soon!)


	3. chapter 3

Master and Servant, part 3 

by Risu-chan

I am certain that if I had in fact become a doctor, I would have learned far sooner how to deal with both women and youthful curiosity without such misery -- either that, or I would have quit my post and gone off to a monastery to recuperate from causing the humiliations a doctor must consciously inflict upon those he serves.   


I had sworn to myself that I would do everything in my power to encourage Master Cain's newfound interest in the moments beginning lives rather than ending them. But still, it was agonizingly embarrassing to walk up to the counter at the medical library of my former college, with my arms full of texts on pregnancy and related women's disorders.   


Yet I had suffered worse, and gladly, for Master Cain's sake; and this time, barring the chance of an injudicious paper cut, neither of us would need so much as a single bandage. I kept telling myself that, firmly, as the prim and bespectacled girl behind the counter gave me a long cynical look amidst her book-shuffling.   


When he saw some of the titles of the books I held, the flare of eager, delighted fascination in Master Cain's eyes made all the embarrassment worthwhile. However, it was very nearly as embarrassing to try to answer his more indelicate questions, and to sit with him searching together for the answers -- and there was a far more professional embarrassment that no amount of medical schooling could have braced me for.   


"These people are idiots," Master Cain said, scrubbing a hand through his hair in frustration. "Petty squabbling self-righteous idiots. They spend more time assaulting each other's pet theories and reputations and egos than in scientifically testing their hypotheses. And I dare swear half of them are lying about their results, because they cannot all have 'proven' theories at diametric opposites to each other!"   


"They are human, sir," I said, very carefully. "Humans make mistakes, and are easily hurt."   


"A man's ego has nothing to do with the objective outcome of an experiment."   


I sighed despite myself. "Master Cain... they are not all independently wealthy. Most of them are not. A researcher must have funds and supplies in order to perform his research... and unsuccessful research is often terminated."   


"In other words -- the independently wealthy ones feel free to continue their testing until they have amassed enough data to be able to discard the results at odds with their favorite notion, and the dependent ones feel obliged to falsify their results in order to continue to receive funding?"   


I felt obliged to defend my former profession through an obscure and uncomfortable guilt. "Not in all cases, sir. I'm certain that many of them are sincere, and that perhaps some of their differing results were based on different methodology..."   


"The fact that such fraud happens at all is an insult to the concept of scientific inquiry!"   


"Likewise, murder is an insult to the concept of civilization, Master Cain; and yet it happens as well. We are not truly as civilized as we like to think, even in this age of rationalism."   


Master Cain swept his arm across the desk to clear a space, pulled three books out of the pile, and thumped them down in front of me with an air of utter exasperation. "This one swears that a woman must be bled before the labor and have her abdomen strictly corseted to prevent excessive accumulation of fluids during the pregnancy and hemorrhaging at birth. This one maintains that bleeding a woman leads to an increased mortality rate among both mothers and children, and that corseting leads to birth defects, but there is some nonsense about grinding up pig's bones in some unholy witch's brew the mother is to consume in the third trimester. And this one has conceived some wild-eyed theory about sub-racial incompatibilities -- that a light-haired, blue-eyed mother should never be permitted to wed a dark-haired, dark-eyed father because his blood would be stronger than hers somehow, making the pregnancy more difficult to carry to term, and he claims that the rarity of blue-eyed children born to such a family is his proof -- how on earth are the two thoughts even connected?"   


"I'm certain I don't know, sir."   


He shoved his chair back, digging both hands through his hair and staring up at the ceiling. "At least two of them must be lying about their results, if not all three. What am I to believe?"   


"If nothing else, sir, it does seem to indicate that women and children are much hardier than one would expect, given that any of them were able to successfully bear healthy children through such eccentric experimentation. Perhaps they are not lying; perhaps they were simply testing something which was irrelevant. I notice that none of them mentions whether they also studied a group of women upon whom no experiments had been performed."   


"And the only one who recorded information such as the women's height and weight was the lunatic with the fancy for corseting and bleeding, which would in itself skew the results obtained..." He ran a palm down his face. "I am not about to try to tie that woman into a corset and slit her wrists in order to 'improve' her pregnancy's development."   


"Commendable, sir," I said. "I'm sure she will thank you as well."   


"But there has to be _something_ I can do..." He stood, and began to pace irritably about the room. "It seems self-evident to me how many of these things must be terrible ideas, given that the human race survived without corseting, bleeding, and pig's-bone brews long enough to bear the fools writing those books. But for the life of me, I cannot distinguish which among these self-aggrandizing ill-conceived contrivances would be a _good_ thing to do for her."   


I was comforted to realize that for all his unsettling words about establishing human stables for study, what still lay at the innermost core of his impatient inquisitive drive was the desire to help the individual whose cause he had championed. Even though no one had been murdered, Althea had certainly been wronged by the man who had used her and left her. Something in Master Cain's soul responded to that as deeply as he had to the victims of his previous crusades, even if he told himself he cared only for the child.   


"If I might offer a bit of guidance, sir..."   


He gestured vaguely, still too restless to settle again, and started pacing another futile circuit of the study.   


"I think perhaps we should read with a more selective eye. It is not scientific, I admit, but one can hardly test each of these theories on Miss Althea in order to prove or disprove their merit in the most empirical sense. Since no one can accept all of the things written here, it seems most prudent to guide ourselves by the principle of -- for lack of a better word -- gentleness."   


He made a rueful, amused sound. "Do you always judge a remedy's efficacy by its gentleness?"   


"No, of course not, sir; it would rule out the use of surgery. But in this case it seems advisable." I closed a couple of books which were the most egregious offenders, and pulled another one closer to myself. "If we approach this search looking for those remedies which seem least likely to cause harm, then we may also find some which do good in the process... and at least we will not have made things worse."   


Master Cain pulled the chair back over to the desk and sat down beside me again, and leaned an elbow on the desktop with a small sigh. "Lead on, then," he said, wry. "You are far more skilled than I in gentleness."   


_You are not as unkind a person as you think yourself to be, Master Cain._ "As you wish, sir."   


Over the next several hours, we crafted a list together of remedies we considered unlikely to be harmful, and then re-sorted them based on the secondary criterion of "would Miss Althea permit this to be done to her."   


"I do think providing her with milk is a good idea," I said. "After all, milk is meant for the very young, so surely the mother's consumption of it would do no particular harm to the unborn either."   


"Providing, yes, of course," Master Cain said with a sigh. "But there is the proverb about leading the horse to water; I suspect that if left to her own devices the woman would rather bathe in it as a beauty-treatment than drink it. Still, there are certainly farms enough in the area. ...And I'm certain we can rule out hot springs; the nearest one I know of is in Bath, and she might have given birth by the time we took her that far."   


"She is not quite so far along as you think," I said. "I would estimate that she has another month to six weeks left."   


His brows arched skyward in mute but eloquent disbelief. "And you insist she won't burst?"   


"I promise, sir," I said, hoping that I would not find myself feeling extremely silly at the first instance of a woman's bursting in the entire history of human pregnancy. But on that one point, I felt the chances were so unlikely that I could safely give him my word on it. "And even if Bath is too far, there is nothing to say that we could not contrive a way to heat water at the cottage for her. I'm sure the therapeutic effects for childing women have less to do with the minerals in the water and more to do with warmth and support applied to aching muscles unaccustomed to carrying such weight."   


He chuckled. "I can hardly spend the next six weeks walking with her, with my arms about her waist to help carry her weight for her, at that. But I'd imagine she'd be scaldingly indignant if I were even to suggest such a thing. --Therefore, I shall have to suggest it at the next opportunity, of course."   


I made a silent note to myself that perhaps I should very slightly revise my opinion of Master Cain's inherent kindness. Ever so slightly, of course, but the point was there to be observed. While it was a truly kind thought to offer to help her carry the burden she had thus far carried alone, suggesting it simply to watch her shout the ceiling down was not much akin to kindness...   


"As you wish, sir," I said, very carefully, and began to place bookmarks in the open books and stack them more neatly on the desk. "As it's almost time for dinner...?"   


Master Cain made a small disappointed sound. "But there's so much left to learn!"   


"Do you learn everything there is to know about a poison in one afternoon's study, sir?"   


The corner of his mouth quirked. "Well. An afternoon and a small animal or two would be enough to tell whether or not it is actually toxic; what remains beyond that point is the question of dosage and dilution... but I take your point. How long can you keep these books?"   


"I can renew them if need be," I said. "But these books are not our only source of information, sir. Considering that half the world's population is of the correct gender, and likely more than half of those are old enough to give birth..."   


His eyes lit from within. "Riff, how many of the staff have children?"   


With some trepidation, I said, "Quite a few, sir."   


Suddenly, he was more than happy to leave the books and the study behind and hurry downstairs to the dining room.   
I followed with somewhat unseemly haste, already dreading what my injudicious comment might have set loose upon the unsuspecting women of the household.

***  


Although I kept a sharp eye on Master Cain throughout dinner, he behaved himself with extraordinary decorum, considering his usual behavior while in the grip of some sleuthing pursuit. He engaged the housekeeper in a far too innocently inquisitive-sounding discussion of her family life, and he asked about several maids and some other staff members' families; but since he never mentioned the word "stable," I thought it safe to let myself relax a bit.   


After all these years, I should have known better.   


My mistake was in letting him out of my sight after dinner. While I was going about my usual business of seeing the house quieted and closed up for the night, Master Cain was busying himself with cutting an astounding swathe of mortification and terror through the ranks of the female staff.   


Much to my chagrin, I only realized what had been happening the next morning -- when the red-faced housekeeper brandished a fistful of resignation papers under my nose and started in on a nearly incoherent tirade about civility and the lack thereof and proper treatment of one's social inferiors and how the whole staff had heard the rumors about Master Cain's abnormal tastes and peculiar behaviors but they'd previously thought the poor abused boy a less despicable sort than his philandering father and since he'd never abused the staff they hadn't given the rumors credence until now and it was all just terribly appalling and I reached out and clamped a hand over her mouth to get a word in edgewise.   


"Have any of them left yet?" I asked, more sharply than I ought to have.   


The housekeeper shook her head a little, pointing toward the stairs to the servants' quarters.   


"You're not to let them out of the building," I said. "I'll take them to the parlor and try to talk them out of it. If anyone tries to make it past you, send them to me first..." I plucked the brandished papers out of her hands and skimmed through them as I took the stairs two at a time.   


And so I spent the next four hours amid a cluster of sobbing, shouting, outraged, terrorized, and humiliated women -- all mothers or rumored mothers-to-be -- and I struggled desperately to bring some sort of order to the chaos.   


"And he said something about a _camera!_ Appalling-- I have no words--"   


"I understand why you're upset--"   


"--I know there are... rumors... but I'm _not!_ I'd never dare scandalize the house-- I've just... gained a bit..."   


"I understand that, but--"   


"--It's just that sometimes mornings disagree with me, that's all -- but I'd never--"   


"Maggie, give it up already; half the country knows about you and the baker's son!"   


"How _dare_ you say such a thing? Is that where the master got such a dreadful idea about me? Of all the nerve -- unfounded allegations -- sheer slander--"   


"But the question at hand--"   


"Never mind Maggie and her loose skirts, what I can't believe is that he wanted to take away my _corset!_ As if a lord and a gentleman would have any business--"   


"It's not really--"   


"_All right!_ All right, damn your prying eyes, yes, I-- I'm--"   


"_That's_ hardly news; anyone with eyes knows about her. But I'm a married woman, I don't deserve to be threatened like this -- to have my very livelihood threatened if I don't comply with his perverse--"   


"I'll be fired anyway, Mr. Raffit, I know I will -- at least this way I can leave on my own terms, rather than being thrown out for a tramp--"   


"But he doesn't intend--"   


"You _are_ a tramp, girl, but as for the rest of us-- a camera! How dare he--"   


_"Will you all please just SHUT UP?"_ I shouted at the top of my lungs.   


Every head in the room swiveled to stare at me.   


I cleared my throat awkwardly, and took a deep breath to try to get it all said at once, lest their momentary shock revert back to chattering indignation before I had a chance to intervene.   


"Master Cain has no intention of firing anyone. Neither for a bit of indiscretion nor for anything else. If you're uncomfortable with his requests, tell him so. You may need to be rather firm. He's quite stubborn when he has an idea in his head. But you won't be fired for telling him you won't let him take pictures or steal your corsets or whatever else it is he's asked of you. He's simply trying to learn about... well... families, and how they begin. Please. I promise you, no one will be fired for any of this, and I'd be truly, deeply grateful if you would choose _not_ to resign. Please, stay here, and help me teach him how it is that normal families live... because it's something he's never known."   


The women looked at me with expressions ranging from desperate hope to complete skepticism, and then they looked at each other, and the chattering started again.   


"Nobody could call _this_ family normal, could they. The poor thing..."   


"You have to admit, at least he's not like his father..."   


"At least you knew where you stood with his father! Of all the impertinent--"   


I sighed, and folded myself carefully into a chair, and sat to wait for some of the carnage  
to die down again.   


After several hours' desperate negotiation, and my sworn word to write up a list of the women's complaints and take it to Master Cain personally, I convinced all but one of them to stay. Unfortunately, while I'd been taken by the diplomatic crisis, the housekeeper had been taken by lunch, and two more maids simply left without even turning in their resignation papers.   


_On the bright side, at least we hadn't lost the lot of them,_ I thought, stalking back up the main staircase with a carefully detailed list of the women's requests clutched in a hand shaking with tension. I knocked on the door of the study hard enough to rattle it in its frame.   


Master Cain swung the door open and greeted me with a dazzling sunny smile, and caught at my arm to drag me over to his pile of books. "Riff, look here, I think I've found something useful--"   


I tried very hard to keep my voice even. "Master Cain, there's something we need to discuss."   


He shoved his bangs back from his face and blinked up at me. "What is it?"   


I didn't even know where to begin. _Stop terrorizing your staff, Master Cain,_ or _At least try to behave like a civilized being, Master Cain,_ or _Do you know how mortifying it is to be locked up in a room with that many cackling hens for four hours while trying to talk them out of making a scandal across half the countryside, Master Cain?_ all seemed so... inadequate.   


I set the paper down in front of him firmly. "The women of the staff have some concerns about your recent... inquisition."   


Master Cain laughed. "Yes, I didn't imagine I'd have any ready volunteers, but it seemed ridiculous to overlook such a resource without even asking."   


He had no idea. None whatsoever. I took another deep breath, and said, "Nearly a dozen of them tried to quit this morning. Three of them did leave. I managed to persuade the rest to stay. I went to some lengths to assure them that none of them would be fired either for saying no to you or for a child's illegitimacy."   


"Of course I didn't," Master Cain said. "What on earth would have put that into their heads? Thank you for taking care of that for me."   


"Master Cain..."   


"What?"   


He _still_ had no idea. But, try as I might, I couldn't think of a way to explain it to him. I sighed, and said, "Please, Master Cain, if you would at least read their requests..."   


He glanced down at the piece of paper, skimmed the text briefly, and laughed aloud. "If I didn't know better I'd say they'd presented you with a declaration of war. Are they _that_ irrationally attached to their corsets?"   


There was only one thing I could say. "Yes, sir, they are."   


"Fine, fine."   


"Master Cain--"   


"Hmm?"   


_You'd be taking this much more seriously if you were the one who'd been henpecked for four hours this morning, sir._ "Please try to be a bit more selective in what you ask of the staff, sir."   


He grinned at me. "Meaning 'stop terrorizing the maids'?"   


I took another deep breath, and braced myself to keep my voice as calm as humanly possible. "Yes, sir. I would be _most_ grateful."   


"Fine. So that's settled." Master Cain pointed imperiously at a seat beside him, and said, "You've got to read this!"   


Feeling rather as though someone had painted a target between my shoulderblades, I sat beside him, shoulders hunched against the next onslaught from the housekeeper or the staff or the universe in general.  


(part 4 coming sometime...) 


End file.
